Jayashri regularly invites industry speakers for her large PG course on Electrical Safety. However, she faced challenges in getting those industry inputs every year. Additionally, once the class schedule was planned, the speakers’ availability would change, so she had to move everything else around. This uncertainty associated with relying on guest speakers is what motivated her to convert the industry lectures to online videos, in 2017. This allowed her to plan the whole semester without any changes in schedule, and the speakers themselves enjoyed the flexibility of recording the video at a time convenient to them. This relatively small change based on course logistics had a much more significant impact on student learning and in-class activities. She also uses industry assessors for her courses.
About Jayashri Ravishankar
Dr Jayashri Ravishankar is an education-focussed academic in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications. Her LnT interests are in the areas of technology innovations and industry partnerships for blended delivery. She consistently implements various strategies to improve students’ active learning. She publishes in the IEEE Teaching, Assessment and Learning for Engineering (TALE) conference every year. In 2016, she received the Teaching Excellence Award in Engineering at UNSW.