Social psychology (psychology)/Evaluation

Unit: Social Psychology/G (7125/6666), 2008/9 Unit convener: James Neill

This reflective statement and the accompanying student satisfaction results were the basis of a successful application for a Unit Convener Award, Faculty of Health, University of Canberra, 2009.

The teaching innovation involved achievement of high student satisfaction levels with teaching of social psychology using open access blogs and wikis to enhance student engagement, reflection, and sharing during 2007 and 2008.

Overview
During 2007/8, I was the unit convener for Social Psychology, a third-year undergraduate unit. I also opted to teach all the lectures and tutorials (enrolment ~70-80 students) in an effort to:


 * 1) Stimulate student engagement and raise educational quality,
 * 2) Ensure consistent quality of delivery, and
 * 3) Implement innovative use of student-oriented, experiential, educational technologies, particularly the use of student blogs (2007) and wiki-based (2008) e-portfolios.

Teaching and learning theory or research
Fundamental to the delivery of this unit was the use of interactive, experiential, educational technologies. The underlying idea was to enable students to explore, record, and share their interactions with the unit's learning activities openly and online. In this way, students' learning (as opposed to teachers' teaching) was made more prominent. The role of the instructor, in this approach, was to facilitate students in learning how to utilise blogging (2007) and wikis (2008) to demonstrate their engagement with the unit's learning activities. To see students' work, visit:


 * 2007: http://ucspace.canberra.edu.au/display/7125/List+of+all+blogs
 * 2008: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Social_psychology_(psychology)/Participants

Implications of this teaching and learning innovation for the faculty
The 2007/8 teaching of this unit demonstrated two successful, interactive approaches to teaching and learning: student blog-based and wiki-based e-portfolio assessment exercises. Such practices offer examples that other teaching staff may consider, particularly with regard to addressing new Performance Expectations for Academic Staff, especially Step 18: Demonstrate the adoption of best practice use of educational technologies.

This new performance expectation represents a significant challenge for many staff because student-oriented pedagogies which utilise new educational technologies are under-developed at UC. Successful implementation of such approaches, like other innovative teaching practices, require a significant level of enthusiasm and facilitative expertise by instructional staff. Hopefully these demonstrably successful models and examples will be of value to others.

Student satisfaction
The Unit Satisfaction Survey (USS) results for these units revealed a consistently high level of student satisfaction with both approaches (see Table 1), with Overall and Average student ratings above 6 out of a possible 7 (compared to a faculty average of 5.6 and UC average of 5.5 in 2008). Students appear to have exhibited a preference for the 2007 (blog-based) approach than the 2008 (wiki-based) approach, probably because students found blogs simpler and easier to edit.



The full USS reports, including students' open-ended comments are available from:


 * 2007: http://ucspace.canberra.edu.au/download/attachments/753755/7126_6666_2007_USS_Results.rtf
 * 2008: http://ucspace.canberra.edu.au/download/attachments/54034478/7126_6666_2008_USS_Results.doc