Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Atousa Hajshirmohammadi, School of Engineering Science

Project team: Fabio Campi, Lecturer, School of Engineering Science, Maryam Dehghani Estarki, Ali Zari Ghanavati, Harneet Jhattu, YiNan Liu, Bikramdeep Singh, and Higgins Weng, research assistants

Timeframe: January 2015 to February 2018

Funding: $9,500

Course addressed: ENSC 280 – Engineering Measurement and Data Analysis

Final Report:  View Atousa Hajshirmohammadi's final report (PDF)

Interim Report: View Atousa Hajshirmohammadi's interim project report (PDF)

Description: As a Senior Lecturer in ENSC, I teach large classes and this limits the amount of interaction I can have with individual students, which consequently can result in losing student engagement. I believe by delivering the course content in formats other than, and in addition to, the traditional lecture/textbook format, students' engagement can be encouraged.

The idea of this project was to create a set of interactive quizzes for students’ practice. The quizzes are in digital format and include practice problems on one or more concepts introduced in the course.The quizzes are interactive in the sense that once a student completes and submits the quiz, they can receive immediate feedback. For questions answered correctly, the student will see a message indicating that they are correct and they can also see the full solution. If the answer to a question is wrong, they will be asked to “try again” and will be given a hint.

Questions addressed:

• What are the most difficult concepts to be covered by interactive quizzes?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the first version of our instructional tool?

Knowledge sharing: I plan to share my findings furthermore through venues such as Teaching Matter Seminar series. Within our own School (ENSC) I have talked to colleagues about this project in informal settings.

Hajshirmohammadi, A. (2017, November 27). Interactive quizzes in Canvas. Presentation at DEMOfest 2017: The Art of Assessment, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC.

Keywords: design project; instructural materials; interactive tutorial; student engagement; practice problems; engineering education; web-based instruction; interactive quizzes; online testing