Evolving Use of Educational Technologies

Ray Eaton

This chapter describes the use of educational technology for enhancing student learning at the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications (EE&T) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Over the past decade, the school has introduced and trialled various technology-based approaches in the form of electronic whiteboard-based lectures for remote teaching, voice-over power-point screencasts using tablet PCs for tutorial problems, pre-recorded dynamically annotated lecture material delivered initially via DVDs and later hosted on the cloud as support material for live lectures, distributed laboratories capable of real-time interaction via video, audio and digital annotations, and most recently, the use of iPads to aid in lecture delivery. The impact of these approaches is evaluated in this chapter using student surveys over multiple years, some of which are still ongoing. The results of these surveys show that technology-based approaches have a positive impact on student learning experiences. In particular, the students found that the video capture of lectures with appropriate dynamic annotation as support material allowed for flexible learning to suit individual styles.