So Many Moving Pieces: Tips, Tricks and Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Large Scale Active Learning

Is a class size of 300 student a large class? What about 600 students? How about 900? Can you teach classes this large the same way we always have, or do you need to do something different?

Associate Professors Carl Reidsema and Lydia Kavanagh, from the Faculty of Engineering at The University of Queensland, use a flipped model of active learning that integrates theory with design practice in two first-year engineering design courses with up to 1200 students.

Carl Reidsema began his academic career at the University of New South Wales in 2001, where he led the development of one of Australia’s first large scale (1100 students) hands-on active learning team-based first year common courses in engineering design “ENGG1000-Engineering Design and Innovation”. His work, centring on the notion of Transformational Change in Higher Education, has resulted in overall funding for Teaching Focused Scholarship exceeding $6M. He successfully led a 2013 Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) Project “Radical transformation: re-imagining engineering education through flipping the classroom in a global learning partnership” partnering with Stanford, Purdue, Pittsburgh, RMIT and the University of Sydney.

Since returning to academia from industry in 1998, Associate Professor Lydia Kavanagh (Principal Fellow, Higher Education Academy) has become a leader in engineering education and has used her background as a professional engineer to design both curricula and courses for active learning, combining real-world projects and specialist knowledge. As Director of First Year Engineering,  she has had a significant impact on the delivery of UQ’s undergraduate engineering program through creative new teaching pedagogies including the Flipped Classroom (for 600 students at a time), authentic approaches to assessment, proactively ensuring team success, and the introduction of multi-disciplinary courses. Lydia is also the Deputy Associate Dean Academic (Curriculum Review and Teaching Innovation) for the Faculty of Science and is currently coordinating UQ’s blended learning initiative for two faculties.

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