From Explaining to Engaging: A Seventy-Thirty Rule

At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, universities worldwide quickly adapted to an online teaching setting as an emergency measure. During this rapid adaption, individual academics were given the challenge of teaching online [1]. Due to the vast discrepancies between the usual pedagogical approach to online teaching and to online teaching necessitated by the pandemic, the latter limited itself to instructor-centred knowledge transmission [2]. More recently, learning has moved back to the on-campus setting. This paper reports on one instructor's change to on-campus sessions based on experience in transforming pre-pandemic on-campus sessions, which were explanation centred, to pandemic online sessions, which were activity-centred and therefore more engaging for the students. The post-pandemic on-campus sessions comprised three parts: (1) Whiteboard Centring, (2) Case Study Introduction, and (3) Solution Envisioning. The sessions were strongly student-centred and incorporated a 15 to 20-min break. The material covered in the sessions was examined in the module's unseen 2h examination. When compared with previous results, the students performed better overall, and inspection of the examination scripts suggested that more of the students had a better understanding of the material. The paper discusses the extent to which the improvement reflects the student-centred approach. In addition, a 7030 rule is proposed as a way of both characterising the instructor's student-centred approach and offering one guide to instructors as to whether they themselves are adopting a student-centred approach.