LESSON 3: TASK 2: INTERACTION IN CLASS

In this entry of this blog, I will discuss the type of interaction with students in the specific learning context of a class of both first and second year of a university degree.

I teach Statistics and Econometrics in the second year of the Economics Degree and Basic Bussiness and Economics Introduction in the first year of Event Planner Degree, where also an online version is available.

Regarding the experience in the Economics Degree, I use half of the weekly hours to explain theoretical concepts and the rest of time during the week is used to solve practical exercises related to the theoretical part. The exams and didactic units of this course are completely coordinated at departmental level. This subject is quite new to them; it is also quite quantitative and therefore those students without a strong mathematical background can be demotivated quite soon.

During the theoretical part, I try to connect the current units with those units previously explained or with some knowledge they should have as a background. I try to give them the intuition of the formulas or their origin. I always ask questions to random students (sometimes not so random and especially to those people that seem particularly lost) that try to connect with concepts that they must have. In this way, it is easy to get an idea of whether they are understanding and following the explanations. Many times, they help me to develop new formulas in the blackboard so that they realised that they could do it on their own with only a little bit of help.

I find this strategy quite useful because they can see that we do not made up the formulae but they have a meaning and a specific use. However, students do not like to be asked randomly. It seems to me that at the university classes they are used to attend classes where there is zero interaction between the students and the professor and sometimes they are annoyed if there is any because they want to feel there is total freedom about how they organise their learning process.

The way of solving the exercises has change in the last few years. Few years ago, teachers solve the exercises for the students in the blackboard. Students were asked whether there was any volunteer willing to solve an exercise and explain the solution to the rest of his classmates. This methodology did not allow us to check the actual level of students and by the end of the course we found much less students in our classes and a high proportion of failed exams. It was also a methodology that did not allow any room for interaction with students, apart from the office hours (which were used by a very small proportion of students and mainly at the end of the term and few weeks before the exam). The current method of solving the exercises implies that students solve the exercises on their own at home and they show how they solved them in the blackboard. Additionally, this is now part of the evaluation of each student and takes part of their final mark. Of course, the level of participation has increased a lot because this is a compulsory part in the evaluation.

In our opinion, the advantage of this little improvement in the way of interacting with students is that this allows them to improve their communication skills, they make the effort to solve the exercise as clear as possible in order to show the solution to his classmates. Additionally, this helps us to have more information about our students (which is not always easy in classrooms with 90 students). Students are forced to face an exercise without the support of the written solution, which is essential in order to develop their autonomy and creative thought. We have been experiencing much better results at the end of the term after this change, and the reason is that students read and understand the material along the whole term and not only at the end.

However, some of the disadvantages are that they copy the solution from other classmates without acquiring a full understanding of what they have to explain. Sometimes they are not even able to use the statistical software provided to solve the practical exercises. This is quite easy to detect by asking small questions or small deviations from the problem. These students are only motivated by the grade given to them. Collaborative work is allowed but no free-riding behaviours.

The methodology I used in the first year of the degree in a introductory subject on Economics is totally different. Here the class size is smaller and there are not so many mathematical concepts because I am more interested in few intuitions and applying few theoretical concepts to the real life. Although they have to hand some individual exercises in using a moodle platform, most of the times we work in groups in the class. They have to do case studies, read articles from the news related to the concepts covered in the didactic units and provide joint answers to practical questions and exercises. They also have to work in groups and create a (fake) firm as a final assessment in order to apply all the concepts covered during the course. At the end of the term, they have to present to the rest of the class their firm project. The rest of the students suggest changes to financial policy or to the marketing strategy. I have been teaching this course for 3 years and the results are quite impressive. I start the term with quite a few students without any knowledge of business and economics and the results are very good and accurate projects.

In the online version of this course, we have a two hours lecture in order to summarize the most important results, but then we interact using virtual office hours using Skype. I also record few videos to explain additional concepts that they find to be more difficult. I also post some debates on recent news in the moodle platform where students are expected to use the vocabulary and the knowledge given in the course. They find all these strategies quite useful because they feel in touch with the materials and the teacher during those periods of time with no class.