Abstract:

Nowadays the technology offers many tools to enhance learning and teaching. Students are familiar to use technological devices, digitalization boom has surrounded us and technological solutions for the education is available. Topics such as flipped classroom, videos, online assessment, gamification, STACK exercises, learning analytics are popular topics in today’s education. Adding the facts that the study cohorts are nowadays more heterogeneous and larger, student’s mathematics’ skills and knowledge has weakened and the resources among others into the contact lessons has decreased. The utilization of the ICT solutions helps education to rise to correspond to 21st century expectations.

This paper introduces teaching experiments and usage technological tools in engineering mathematics courses Differential and Integral Calculus during the Spring semesters of 2016 and 2017, at the Tampere University of Applied Sciences. The aim on the courses have been to enhance the learning outcomes by exploiting educational technology. On the courses have been used among others flipped classroom, STACK exercises, videos, online assessment and mathematical tools and software. These courses are compulsory for all engineering students, the courses are for the first year students and the reform of the courses were carried out in the degree programs Construction engineering, Bioproduct and process engineering and in ICT engineering.

With the help of the videos, students who are not fluent in math are able to study the subject at their own pace. For all students the use of videos offers autonomous in the sense that it is up to the student when and in what extent s/he will use videos. Years of experience as a teacher has shown that the different kind of interactions, teacher-student or student-student, generates good learning results. Nowadays there is less time face-to-face support so for this purpose I tested flipped classroom model in my classes. Students prepared to the classes in advance by reading books, notes, preparatory videos and online quizzes about the theory. Then in-classes there were more time to do the exercises, have an interactive teaching sessions where was more, in addition to time for doing the exercises, discussions between students and teacher. In addition to the videos and flipped classroom model, the STACK exercises were tested on the courses. These automated exercises gave instant feedback to students in forms hints up to the solution of the exercise. In final exam of the courses, one part of the exam was implemented with STACK exercises and the second part was traditional paper-based exam. First part of the exam was assessed on-line.

This paper presents:
(1) development reformed Differential and Integral Calculus courses,
(2) operational experiences of the technological tools, and
(3) the results of the courses’ questionnaires about the students’ thoughts and opinions towards flipped classroom, STACK exercises, videos, online assessment and mathematical tools and software.

Effective use of technology with the overarching aim is that this will contribute to a better learning process and increased understanding of the engineering mathematics study.

Keywords:

Engineering mathematics, mathematics learning, mathematics teaching, technological tools, flipped classroom, STACK exercises, videos, online assessment.