Online quizzes to increase student learning in an engineering unit

Due to rapid changes in the communication technologies, the teaching and learning has changed dramatically over the last two decades. The face-to-face (class room based) teaching remains one of the most predominant ways of imparting knowledge to students. On the other hand, different online activities are increasingly being used to supplement traditional face-to-face engagement. In this paper, engagement strategies adopted while delivering one of the civil engineering subjects (units) from Bachelor of Engineering program offered by Western Sydney University are presented. The engineering course includes mathematical manipulation and engineering software learning. In addition, students participate in online in-lecture engagement tool and quizzes, tutorial sessions, group assignments and final exams. While some of the activities in the course such as in-lecture engagement tool and weekly quizzes are online, tutorial sessions are delivered via face-to-face mode. It was found that failure rate was significantly less for students who passed in online quizzes. Thus indicating that online quizzes may lead to deeper understanding of the lecture materials covered under the unit investigated as part of this study