Complete thesis - Murdoch University

Figure 7.16: Good/bad things about a unit structured this wayfrom the specification developed by your team) students were asked for their impressions ontheir team performance and asked to comment on whether they thought they learnt less ormore this way. This provided rich data on student perception of the learning environment ingeneral, and could be mapped to specific students (comments could be made anonymously,if preferred - only submission/no submission was recorded as an assessment object, but moststudents were happy to submit with name). The responses were coded to identify recurrentthemes, with frequency of comments recorded in a spreadsheet. Students were asked to reflecton the following questions:• what is good/bad about a unit structured this way. Figure 7.16 shows the results. Whilesome students could appreciate the authentic nature of the environment (like RE practice),this learning style did not sit well with many students (intimidating learning style;sudden change in study style). However, the groupwork environment was almost alwaysviewed positively (project+team improve individual learning/group lottery)• things to add/change/delete in how the virtual secondment and project were organised.Figure 7.17 shows that students felt they lacked guidance in the form of examples andexercises to use for benchmarking their performance (need examples/reference/guide).In addition, they expressed concern that such a large component of their assessmentwas based on group work (add more individual), generally a feature of capstone projectsonly. The relevance of non-problem-related elements was also raised as an issue (linksupplementary work to project)315