A postgraduate MATLAB course has been designed based on blended learning and flipped classroom approaches, at the Physics department, Imperial College London. Students carried out some activities and finished an assessed exercise before attending each MATLAB lecture.
Before each session, students went through some self-paced, interactive pre-lecture activities on the MATLAB website, and got familiar with part of the topics of the session. In these modules, students learnt the topic by answering questions and writing the codes on MATLAB website. Then, they were required to answer a programming exercise on Blackboard. This pre-lecture exercise should be submitted before the lecture and carries out 10% of the mark for each session. Sessions started with a short lecture followed by Q&A. Then, students worked on exercises on Blackboard, using MATLAB Grader. Students received immediate feedback on their submissions. MATLAB grader has been integrated on Blackboard to automatically grade submitted codes. So students could write, run, and submit their MATLAB codes on Blackboard, and receive immediate feedback on their performance.
Student feedback has been carefully analysed to identify successful and unsuccessful components of the course. End-of-course surveys shows that most students found pre-lecture activities and exercises very useful to enhance their understanding.
Resources
- Slides (.pdf)