I was the TA for 3 years since the first offering of this course, in the fall semester of 2018; till today. My responsibilities included running tutorials and marking assignments and midterms as well as helping during the midterm and final exams. I spent 2hr/week in tutorial sessions and 2hr/week marking the midterms and assignments, 1hr/week responding to student questions and concerns and 4hr invigilating the exam; which adds up to total of 72hr/term for 60 students (in 2018) and 95 students (in 2019) and 120 students (this year) in the second-year biomedical engineering program who register in this course.
- Teaching Approach
For each tutorial session, I select a series of relevant practice problems with biomedical applications to present to the class. Upon introducing each problem to the class, I gave students time to set up the problem and start the solution. Then I provide a clear explanation of how to translate the word problems to thermodynamic symbols, drawings and equations. At this point I gave students another chance to try solving the problem and while they are working together to find the right solution for it, I walks in the class, further clarifying any ambiguities or asking probing questions that lead students to the correct conclusion. Then, I solve the problem to the whole class and answers any other questions before moving to the next problem. Although the number of problems covered in each tutorial is lower than any traditional tutorial session (in which problem solutions are just simply presented to the class), I think these fewer number of practice problems have higher quality in terms of students’ actual learning. I believe this would help student build confidence in their technical knowledge and critical thinking capabilities. Students found this approach very effective and helpful for their general understanding of the course content.
- Teaching Interventions
Since the fall 2018 offering of this course was its very first offering, I worked very closely with the course instructor to develop the practice problems for the tutorials as well as problem sets for the assignments of the course. A potential modification I am hoping to implement in the future is to provide the tutorial practice problems ahead of time to the students and ask them to try solving them on their own and this would potentially increase the efficiency during the tutorial, while still being effective and thought provoking. On the other hand, to make learning thermodynamics more fun, I am thinking of designing some class activities to improve student engagement which in turn would potentially enhance student learning. For example, I believe, starting the topics with an example of how our everyday activities are dominated by the laws of thermodynamics and how to solve these systems, as well as providing small incentives for those who get to the right answer within their group would encourage students.
- Challenges
This course was being offered for the first time in fall 2018 as part of the biomedical engineering program in the newly established School of Biomedical Engineering. Although the general syllabus of the courses is set and developed, design and delivery of the practice problems with an application-based approach is a critical aspect of teaching this course. In addition to this, thermodynamics is notoriously difficult for more university students. To make the content more approachable, I incorporated an interactive style for tutorial sessions of this course in which students are presented with the practice problems and encouraged to collaboratively solve or at least try to set up the problem in a group. As a TA I would closely monitor student interactions among the groups and intervene in their discussions as further explanation and/or clarification was needed, after which the problems were then solved with the help of the class. This kind of interactive tutorials has been shown to be more beneficial than regular tutorials for student learning [3].