Developing Creative Digital Communication, Learning Resources and Evaluation Skills with YouTube and Self and Peer-Assessment

Communication and creativity are fundamental skills that graduate engineers need for the future work force. Many engineering communication assessments are targeted at formal presentations for professional audiences, and not the new generation of young, digital savvy, potential customers. Many creativity-based learning objectives are tied to problem solving and not explicitly taught. This study tries to address these two gaps by introducing a YouTube activity paired with formative self- and peer-assessment. This activity also provides students in a flexible first year engineering program awareness of digital technologies and learning resources. To determine the success of the activity three research questions are investigated: 1. Would students be against undertaking such a creativity-based, teach the content styled activity? 2. Would the YouTube activity encourage creativity? And 3. Would students use the student developed resources for exam preparation? The results from this pilot study suggest that this approach makes a positive contribution towards building students\u27 creative digital communication skills