Academics applauded for good teaching

摘要

Several engineering academics received citations this month from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council for outstanding contributions to student learning. University of Adelaide staff earned two citations. Associate Professor David Walker was praised for "providing a supportive learning environment while improving learning outcomes through the implementation of a self-paced learning program for engineering modelling and analysis." Many students were failing his course, so Walker did away with most of the lectures. Instead, he divided the material into modules which students had to work through at their own pace. This approach was not immediately popular with students, but the pass rate shot up to 95%. Building on this experience, Walker wrote a textbook with three other academics, which will be published soon. He said the key to a good textbook is to have many short chapters with examples and exercises.