Using audio based learning activities to enhance the student learning experience

Today’s students expect their education to be delivered to them in ways that are different to the more traditional delivery mechanisms that many of their tutors may have experienced (Coopers & Lybrand, 1998). The old ‘chalk and talk’ approach, in which students hurriedly took notes from the chalkboard as lecturers reeled off board after board of ‘scrawl’ for transfer to the student’s notepads without having passed through the brain of either tutor nor student are not acceptable today. Nowadays, students expect their lectures to be interesting events that employ a variety of stimulating delivery mechanisms, in which their participation is important and in where they can be motivated into engaging with the curriculum because they see its purpose and have fun as they learn (Biggs, 2003; McKeachie, 2002) This project proposal aims to encourage student engagement with their respective programme curricula by introducing more variety into their learning via audio based learning activities. Instead of the usual text based, visual, teaching they usually receive, students will participate in learning through which the majority of the required knowledge and understanding will be constructed via activities that are strongly audio based. This project will explore whether, and to what extent, this audio based activity engages students in comparison to equivalent text based activities and whether they foster deeper learning as a result. The following rationale answers the question ‘why use audio-based activities’