Purpose: Online resources can be helpful for students and can augment the content presented in learning environments. A team consisting of four biologists, a graduate student, instructional designer and media developers collaborated on the design, development and evaluation of first-year biology online tutorials in a Canadian University. The…

Active-learning pedagogical practices are encouraged in the education literature to improve academic outcomes. The research reported in this paper explored the effect of real-time interactive polling--a type of active learning--on three measures of academic outcome: final marks, student engagement, and failure probability. To provide credible…

In the context of increased concerns about student engagement across the higher education sector, which have intensified subsequent to the rapid transition to online delivery in March 2020, this small-scale research project aimed to explore the motivations for student engagement in self-selecting learning development (LD) online tutorials. The…

When the first national lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic occurred, all higher educational institutions in Ireland moved to remote learning and have effectively remained in this mode ever since. The situation presented enormous challenges for many mathematics lecturers who had not delivered lectures or tutorials online before. This study looks…

This article delivers an evaluation of a pedagogical intervention implemented within a first-year undergraduate university module. The intervention, termed the student-led tutorial (SLT), is based on the concept of the tutorless tutorial and presents a platform for student learning which was designed to increase active learning prior to their…

Undergraduate students are increasingly working with academic staff to evaluate and design teaching materials in Higher Education, thereby moving from being passive consumers of knowledge to genuine partners in their education. Here we describe a student partnership project run at the University of Cambridge, which aimed to improve undergraduate…

Online collaborative writing tools provide an efficient way to complete a writing task. However, existing tools only focus on technological affordances and ignore the importance of social affordances in a collaborative learning environment. This article describes a learning analytic system that analyzes writing behaviors, and creates…

Tutorials are a common complementary method of achieving student engagement with material covered in lectures, as students achieve deeper understanding by being involved in small group discussions. However, in an attempt to provide students with a taste of everything the industry has to offer, the Centre for Forensic Science at the University of…

We report on the implementation of a monitoring scheme by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the National University of Ireland Maynooth. The scheme was introduced in an attempt to increase the level and quality of students' engagement with certain aspects of their undergraduate course. It is well documented that students with higher…

In this study we explore how absence from sociology classes is understood by undergraduate students at University College Dublin. The authors use Scott and Lyman's (1968) concept of accounts to explore absence sociologically. Drawing on data generated via focus groups, an open-ended questionnaire, and an online survey with students, we outline the…

Flexible Learning (FL) is a pedagogical approach allowing for flexibility of time, place, and audience, including but not solely focused on the use of technologies. We describe Flexible Learning as a pedagogical approach in four courses framed by three key themes: 1) objectives and aspects of course design, 2) evaluation and assessment, and 3)…

As part of an innovative tutorial structure introduced to a first year university mathematics subject, an attendance monitoring system was implemented. The system collected data that was used to investigate the relationship between student attendance and assessment performance which is reported here. The implementation of this system also assisted…

The transition to undergraduate study is often a challenging step for students as they progress from relatively smaller school/college classes with a high degree of contact time with familiar staff to a university department where one-on-one interaction with staff members is significantly reduced. The first year tutorials module offers one of the…

A series of tutorials was re-designed to further engage students in spiral learning and highlight development of transferable skills. The tutorials focused on self-directed and enquiry-based learning, both of which provided particular challenges to students and staff. The students were randomly allocated a media article related to psychology as a…

This article discusses a Design for Learning project in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, where academic and personal support for students was interwoven in their first semester. Staff of the Academic Language and Learning Unit (ALLU) worked with discipline staff to develop their students' capabilities across a range of disciplines,…