Effective use of Zoom technology and instructional videos to improve engagement and success of distance students in engineering

CONTEXT Distance engineering education is a familiar and well-accepted mode of study in Australia, especially for regional areas, due to improvements in technology and convenience of learning opportunities. Many students choose distance mode over face-to-face because of flexibility around work and family commitments. But still, there are a lot of challenges to maintain student engagement and to make learning by distance as effective as on-campus studies. Moreover, most of the distance students choose to study and want to engage with academics outside standard working hours which challenges work-life balance. Online support tools such as Zoom allow students and academics to connect through virtual tutorials from any convenient location, which is an effective use of technology to improve student engagement and their success rate while minimising the inconvenience of after-hours commitments for academics. PURPOSE The aim is to study the effectiveness of using Zoom technology to offer evening tutorial sessions to improve the success of students studying foundation engineering units by distance mode at a regional university, while maintaining a manageable workload for academics. APPROACH A course Moodle site gives information about the learning behaviors of students. For example, data can be collected on how many students watched a lecture or the most frequently watched parts of lectures. In this study, student engagement with the course was measured by closely observing the number and types of posts to the Q&A Forum on the Moodle site for the years 2016 and 2017 and the number of students attending Zoom virtual tutorials when introduced in 2017. RESULTS Data collected from the Moodle site over the 2016 and 2017 course offerings showed levels of engagement were maintained with the learning resources (Q&A Forum in 2016 and additionally the Zoom virtual tutorials in 2017). Also, a similar response rate was recorded for the course evaluation questionnaire but satisfaction scores improved in many areas. The introduction of Zoom virtual tutorials resulted in higher student satisfaction and a reduction in instructor workload of approximately 25%. CONCLUSIONS By offering online Zoom tutoring sessions, the number of questions and answers posted on the Moodle has reduced significantly and reduced the workload of academics. This has been achieved without reducing the engagement levels of students or altering the grade distribution.