A problem shared is a problem halved: Benefits of collaborative online engineering L and T content development

Context: Three academics from three separate Engineering schools (Chemical, Civil and Mechanical) at a large, research-intensive public university, identified an opportunity to collaborate with an Engineering student partner, Educational Developer and Learning Analytics Manager on the design and development of blended learning resources. The collaboration focused on the development of a question bank that could be shared across the three schools to support teaching in large cohorts. This paper explores the different perspectives of all stakeholders in the project, the challenges experienced and how the team resolved them. Purpose: Student feedback across the three schools revealed an opportunity to provide more individualised support resources for students in large cohorts. The team considered the use of comprehensive question bank resources to meet this need. An important consideration and challenge for the team was to design feedback mechanisms that enabled students to identify and understand their misconceptions with complex fluid engineering concepts (embedded feedback), and/or receive a general solution approach to help them retry the same question. Approach: After a review of existing practice and a mapping of content taught in the different courses, the team reviewed several commercial off-the-shelf question bank solutions. Many of the commercial products explored were subscription-based, and had customization, content and feedback limitations that reduced the effectiveness and sustainability of the resource. Despite the effort required for the development of a new question bank, this afforded both flexibility and control of the final product. Results: Based on our experience and lessons learnt, we proposed a framework for crossschool collaborative development of blended learning resources, including team composition, distribution of tasks, and tools and strategies for rapid development work, digital content management and sharing. Benefits of the project included the online resources enabling monetary resources to be reallocated to an industry-relevant design activity, thus enabling a better integration of theory and practice in the Chemical Engineering Fluid Mechanics courses. The project also identified an opportunity for shared physical lab resources between the Civil and Mechanical schools. Conclusions: Good strategies in collaborative online content development can lead to many benefits and enable the integration of theory and practice in Fluid Mechanics courses, benefiting the students as well as making the feedback to students more effective.