Advantages of Flexible Delivery for Introductory Physics

A Rayner
Physics Department, The University of Queensland

Abstract

Changes to the structure of the degree programs at the University of Queensland mean that students will find it more difficult to enrol in courses other than those directly related to their degree.

Since a large number of students enter university each year without a high-school background in physics, the opportunity to take an introductory physics course would benefit them greatly. If they were unable to enrol in this course due to timetabling and workload restrictions, this pool of students would have a reduced chance of succeeding in any programme involving physics.

With fixed lecture and tutorial times, the present introductory course will become less attractive to students as changes are implemented next year. Another problem with this course is that the lecturer has changed each time it has been offered over recent years, leading to inconsistencies in the difficulty and amount of material presented.

A solution to both problems may be to offer the present introductory course in a more flexible fashion using multimedia to present meaningful examples in a remote situation. The only scheduled contact time would be for tutorials and laboratories that could be offered at a number of different times. This approach would permit flexible delivery and the ability to keep the course consistent even if the coordinator changed from year to year.

The main difficulty with a multimedia approach to teaching at present is providing (and where necessary enforcing) a structure for the course, so that students have a sense of direction and can work at their own pace without being overwhelmed by the amount of material available. To overcome this I intend to use the Flex-eL learning environment developed by the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at The University of Queensland. Using this technology, each student is managed individually, and allowed to progress through the units of a course at their own pace, but may commence a new unit only after they have demonstrated competence in the relevant preceding units.

I will discuss some of the advantages of using the Flex-eL environment to develop and run a physics course. These include the ability to monitor each student's progress, the option of using online assessment and the possibility of tailoring the course to make it as relevant as possible for each student. Since the course must be of a prescribed workload, there will be some core units that must be completed by every student, as well as a number of optional units. Students would be able to choose which of the optional units they wish to study, but must complete a certain number of these to finish the course.

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