Using E-leaming to activate freshmen: Challenges and experiences

Finnish educational model in higher education has a dual model, consisting of academic universities and more professionally oriented universities of applied sciences (UAS). Students entering UAS's are very heterogeneous what comes to their scientific and mathematical skills. The key to enhance learning outcomes is reported to be the active engagement of the students. In Tampere UAS, a method to study engineering physics has been improved based on good practices from literature. The idea of the method is to push routine-like elements in online environment, mainly with video-clips distributed via YouTube, and to use the valuable lecturing time to activate the students to study. The similar idea is also used in online courses. In this way the routine-like parts of teaching is always available to help the students. Assessment was also changed. The research done in parallel with implementation of the new method suggest that students' activity is closely connected to the periods of assessment. By spreading the assessment throughout the course, students' activity increases and spreads more evenly on the whole course. Small scale research done with individual students' activity shows that the students who fail to pass the course are much less active on their studying than those who pass. The new method has also had a good response from the students.