Beijing University of Technology
China
Benefitting from the rapid development of Internet technology, the learning community, which is a key component of interactive teaching, has opened a whole world of new possibilities in terms of learning and teaching. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of the learning community in enhancing the teaching and learning effect of the operational research course. In addition, methods for improving the existing learning community are proposed.
The undergraduate compulsory course on Operational Research is taken as a case study. The course has 105 students from three major subjects: transportation engineering, road engineering and transportation control engineering. We used the learning community network platform “Rixinxuetang” which is provided by Beijing University of Technology (BJUT). The platform allows teachers to upload educational materials and post course notices. It also offers statistics on the course community usage. The students can discuss and submit homework online. To better evaluate the teaching and learning effect, we designed mutual assessment homework for the students to review the course reports for each other.
In this case, the learning community helped the students to learn the operational research course. It provided a new way for students to contact teachers to solve the problems they encountered in after-school learning. This enhanced the interaction between teacher and students. Moreover, this learning path not only allowed the students to read the materials in the course, but also to review their study effect by comparing and evaluating it with each other.
The inter review mode we used in the learning community provided a scenario for the students to play a role both as students and as the teacher. Through the homework review process, the students wrote their own summary reports on their learning from the chapters and shared them with each other randomly to mark the reviewing score. This mode can help students to learn the operational research courses better. It provides a new way for students to establish the reconstruction of knowledge from the course; and it also offers a platform for them to evaluate their study process with their classmates. At the same time, the teacher can monitor the inter review of the learning scores, which contribute to the blueprint of the learning and teaching effect for the course. This inter review mode in the learning community can also be applied to the teaching processes in other courses.