Fostering interaction and engagement in remotely delivered mathematics tutorials in an Irish university

With the initial COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020 in Ireland, many modules in university programmes that were designed to be delivered face-to-face were suddenly switched to remote delivery. The difficulty for both lecturers and students in replicating face-to-face interaction and the frequent lack of lecturers’ visibility of students’ work in such a setting created challenges for teachers and learners alike. In the current study, students’ perspectives were sought on the format of remotely delivered tutorials for two first-year engineering mathematics modules. The format of the tutorials was designed to emulate face-to-face delivery as closely as possible and to promote student engagement, with an emphasis on real-time lecturer-student interaction as well as comprehensive visibility on student progress throughout each tutorial by combining an online mathematics assessment system Numbas with the video conferencing platform Zoom. Overall, students found the format to be a positive alternative to face-to-face tutorials and one that compared favourably with alternative delivery methods. It is hoped that the findings of this study would be of use to other practitioners engaged in remotely delivered mathematics tutorials.