Web Based Forums For Student Learning Through Teaching

Providing opportunities for students to learn through teaching is becoming practical due to new educational applications of commercial technology and may not only be advantageous to a student’s own process of learning, but beneficial to other students. The media age has introduced positive advances to education and several challenges. The prevalence of quality media rich content related to course material has produced an increasing expectation among students that learning should be easy and is primarily the responsibility of the instructor. Additionally, access to report writing services and vendors who will sell homework solutions manuals presents many challenges to students. Addressing these issues can be frustrating and time consuming for faculty. This paper presents the experiments conducted in four mechanical engineering courses spanning from freshman to graduate level courses that lead the authors to discover that many students enjoy partnering with the faculty in addressing these issues, the benefits to students through involvement in the process, and the practical issues in terms of implementation. In each course students were given projects and or homework assignments that might typically be viewed as work to be accomplished by the instructor. Such activities include the creation of relevant homework problems and solutions, the creation of media-rich instructional materials such as tutorial movies for course related software, and the development of web-based instructional materials related to the course. The impact of the “student learning through teaching activities” on student learning has been positive as evidenced by the improved performance in exams and the positive feedback on surveys. Students are motivated by the fact that their work is being evaluated by their peers and that it has some useful purpose that will continue to serve students for semesters to come. Finally, this paper discusses the use of different web-based forums that are managed by students to facilitate the implementation of the proposed activities.