The objective of this article is to understand how the use of fieldtrips can enhance students' educational experience in Tourism and Hospitality education. A total of 23 students who participated in a fieldtrip as part of their hospitality and tourism degree programme were included in this research. A comparison study was conducted among Year 1…

This article describes a qualitative study which was undertaken to improve the delivery methods and feedback opportunity in honours mathematics lectures which are delivered through Access Grid Rooms. Access Grid Rooms are facilities that provide two-way video and audio interactivity across multiple sites, with the inclusion of smart boards. The…

In a study of notetaking in university courses, we found that the large majority of students prefer paper to computer-based media like Tablet PCs for taking notes and making annotations. Based on this finding, we developed CoScribe, a concept and system which supports students in making collaborative handwritten annotations on printed lecture…

This article describes the use of an Electronic Voting System (EVS) in large group lectures within a business and management undergraduate degree programme, in an attempt to make them more interactive. The intention was to ensure that the introduction of the EVS-style lecture was educationally driven, linked to interactive learning activities in…

Student evaluation questionnaires are used to measure academics' performance in most English universities. Academics are assumed to respond professionally to student feedback, making appropriate improvements to their teaching. This paper describes a small-scale study into lecturers' responses to student feedback. The evidence from semi-structured…

The use of technology to capture the audio and visual elements of lectures, to engage students in course concepts, and to provide feedback to assignments has become a mainstream practice in higher education through podcasting and lecture capturing mechanisms. Instructors can create short podcasts or videos to produce "nuggets" of information for…

The study investigates the actual genetic development of student teachers' interest in lectures given in a postgraduate language teacher education programme. Students recorded the nature and level of interest at various points of the lecture. The results show that students go through diverse patterns of interest trajectories and that, for the…

At the University of Helsinki, special effort has been put to help beginning math students to get started with their studies. This involves new ways of teaching a lecture course and new ways of giving peer support to the students. The results have been promising: the number of students passing certain important courses has been at least doubled…

This study focuses on trainer expressiveness and trainee mastery orientation within the context of the seductive details effect. The seductive details effect refers to inclusion of "highly interesting and entertaining information that is only tangentially related to the topic" (Harp & Mayer, 1998, p. 1). One hundred thirty-two participants…

We investigated a pedagogical innovation in an undergraduate microbiology course (Microbes and Society) for non-majors and education majors. The goals of the curriculum and pedagogical transformation were to promote active learning and concentrate on clarity in teaching. This course was part of a longitudinal project (Project Nexus) which…

Actively engaging students in lecture has been shown to increase learning gains. To create time for active learning without displacing content we used two strategies for introducing material before class in a large introductory biology course. Four to five slides from 2007/8 were removed from each of three lectures in 2009 and the information…

A significant image of classroom lectures is the one presented in J. K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" series. At Harry's Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the most torturous class is easily History of Magic, which is, incidentally, the only class in the school taught by a ghost. Being taught by a ghost could be quite exciting: not so in…

This paper reports on a quasi-experimental study comparing a "productive failure" instructional design (Kapur in Cognition and Instruction 26(3):379-424, 2008) with a traditional "lecture and practice" instructional design for a 2-week curricular unit on rate and speed. Seventy-five, 7th-grade mathematics students from a…

Numerous articles have been published on the merits of active learning, and collectively they present a body of compelling evidence that these methods do enhance learning. In presenting arguments for active learning, it is often suggested that the traditional didactic lecture is more passive in nature and less effective as a teaching tool.…

Qualitative inquiry has gained importance in the evaluation of educational settings because it provides in-depth information, shedding light on context, situations, or processes. In this study, a qualitative inquiry was undertaken in order to evaluate a pedagogical course from the prospective teachers' points of view. In this case study, data were…