Hybrid/HyFlex Models at UNSW Engineering
It’s May and Engineering is pleased to host this month’s meeting, where we’ll share our thoughts and experiences on delivering in hybrid mode.
Speakers & Topic:
Mr. John Paul Posada has been with the Faculty of Engineering since 2008 as an Educational Technologist. During this time he’s introduced numerous technologies to facilitate the faculty’s need to manage larger class sizes and enhance the student and staff experience. These efforts have included many variations of live online content delivery which had Engineering well placed to deal with our current pandemic circumstance.
Presentation
The pandemic placed a lot of pressure on UNSW to adapt to the new norm of moving all teaching activities online. While some considered this an easy solution of just recording all content to make available online, it quickly became apparent that our students expected more. We had to elevate our courses to enable high quality, well produced content delivery while incorporating live interactions from our class participants. In this talk I’ll emphasise a few of the technologies used to make this happen:
- Moodle
- Blackboard Collaborate Ultra
- Zoom
- Microsoft Teams
- Poll Everywhere
- Wirecast
- OBS
- vMix
- XSplit
- NDI
- Microsoft Surface Hub 2S
Dr. Daniel Eggler is an early career education focused academic within the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. His research fields are in acoustics, vibration and active control. He teaches engineering design courses, ranging from first to third year, and embraces work-integrated learning as a powerful intrinsic learning motivator for students. Where possible, hands-on project-based assessments are implemented in any course he teaches as nothing reinforces relevance and accountability like a good ol' fashioned compliance test.
Presentation
Remote delivered hands-on prototyping for mechanical design.
MECH3110 is a 3rd year design course in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. Historically, students would create a prototype on-campus to meet certain requirements under a Project-Based Learning framework. Access to various machine tools were provided as well as dedicated assembly sessions using campus workshops. However, due to the need to cater to offshore students (60 out of 200 total) as a result of COVID-19 border closures, a redesign of the curriculum was required to provide an equitable learning outcome irrespective of student location. The major project’s key deliverables and milestones were adjusted to accommodate a purely online experience, that is, some groups contained no face-to-face students. Assembly sessions were done by proxy and an elaborate live-streaming set up was utilised for the prototype testing event to provide maximum engagement.
Dr. David Kellermann is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW Sydney. In his education practice, he is principally interested in human-centred A.I. to enhance the student experience.
Presentation
In 2019, UNSW was a bricks-and-mortar institution, with only peripheral online offerings. In 2020, along with the rest of the world, the pandemic drove us to being a fully online university. From 2021 onwards, as we gradually reopen our campus experience, we are now a hybrid university. What is the future of learning spaces like lecture theatres and laboratories? How will these spaces create value for fully online students? How do we build a community between a cohort that is half on campus and half online in a way that collectively enriches the educational experience? What is the future of examination without exam halls or proctoring? The physical campus is a millenia-refined concept, the digital campus is yet to be realised, and the hybrid campus is still the stuff of dreams. Join this session where a few folks from the engineering faculty will riff on these ideas and projects that are coming to life right now.