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E-Learning Tools to Facilitate Instruction of a Large Enrollment Structural Engineering Course

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

It's All About the Student: Integration, Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, and Self-Efficacy

Tagged Division

Civil Engineering

Page Count

18

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32683

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32683

Download Count

573

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Paper Authors

biography

Maelle van Thienen University of Auckland, New Zealand

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Maelle van Thienen is a doctoral candidate in civil engineering at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. She has been involved with STEM education since 2011, beginning as a tutor to high-school students while completing her engineering degree. She has been engaged with undergraduate and postgraduate course delivery in the topic areas of light gauge steel, building information modelling and structural engineering at the University of Auckland (2016-present). She gained a MS in civil engineering from the ENISE (National Engineering School of Saint-Etienne) in France.

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Pablo Garcia Xorro Solutions Ltd

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ablo Garcia (ME, MBA) is Managing Director for Xorro Solutions Ltd based out of Auckland, NZ, developer of the Xorro assessment authoring tool Xorro-Q. His entrepreneurial career spans education, health, energy and gaming sectors. Pablo is an enthusiastic advocate for solutions and practices which open new learning and collaboration horizons.

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Wyatt Banker-Hix P.E. California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo

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Wyatt Banker-Hix is a licensed professional engineer in the state of California with over four years of industry experience in structural and transportation engineering. He also serves as a part-time lecturer at California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) in the Civil Engineering department. He enjoys teaching a hands-on materials laboratory course sprinkled with historical anecdotes and humor. Wyatt earned a BS and MS in Civil Engineering from Cal Poly.

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Anahid Behrouzi California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

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Anahid Behrouzi is an assistant professor of architectural engineering at California Polytechnic State University - San Luis Obispo. She has been involved with STEM education beginning in 2003 as a volunteer and summer instructor with the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science. She has been engaged with undergraduate/graduate course delivery in the topic areas of engineering problem-solving and structural engineering at North Carolina State University (2008-2011), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2012-2015), Tufts University (2015-2016), and Cal Poly - San Luis Obispo (2016-present). She has a BS in civil engineering and BA in Spanish language & literature from North Carolina State University, and a MS/PhD in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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James Boon Piang Lim University of Auckland

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James Lim is an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Auckland. James has been teaching the concepts of bending moments and shear forces for more than ten years. He is interested to help students overcome conceptual hurdles in learning structural engineering.

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Abstract

A significant challenge in teaching large civil engineering courses is engaging and providing feedback to students in a meaningful and timely manner. This paper presents a solution that uses e-learning tool Xorro-Q in the successful instruction of a Structures II course of 250+ second year students since 2016 at a research-intensive university in New Zealand.

During the course, Xorro-Q has been utilized as an online practice-based learning tool where students can repeat questions without penalty and automatically receive detailed instructor-developed feedback (diagrams, text, or link to website/video) in response to specific incorrect answers. Additionally, Xorro-Q permits a variety of questions used to promote student proficiency in both calculations and intuition of structural behavior. Some question styles come standard with other online homework interfaces such as multiple choice, numeric or word input, and labelling; others like hotspot images and extended text input are uniquely able to serve the needs of this type of structural engineering course. Together, the grading metrics from Xorro-Q has enabled students to receive useful feedback and instructors a snapshot of student understanding that is necessary to implement just-in-time teaching.

This paper will include examples of structural engineering question styles posed to students in Xorro-Q. Furthermore, it will provide an analysis of student surveys to guide other engineering instructors on utilizing similar e-learning tools in a large enrollment course. To date, the two completed surveys indicate that repetition of questions in Xorro-Q – especially hotspot drawing questions – allowed students to develop confidence in the course topics, and detailed feedback helped them immediately address their conceptual difficulties.

van Thienen, M., & Garcia, P., & Banker-Hix, W., & Behrouzi, A., & Lim, J. B. P. (2019, June), E-Learning Tools to Facilitate Instruction of a Large Enrollment Structural Engineering Course Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32683

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