After Studying at BVRIT for 2 years, I’ve gained a full insight into how useful taking lab sessions can be. Labs such as problem solving, communication and presentation skills, further more there are a wide range of assessment opportunities available such as Formative assessment and optional tutorials. Seminars which fulfill to and match the needs of the students, helping us broaden our knowledge base.
There are several reasons for introducing this teaching method which include the students to engage in pay attention to break-up what would otherwise be a continuous a 3 hour teaching block and to deal with the diversity of student’s abilities and backgrounds. This helped us students to maintain motivation and interest in the course and adds an element of fun. Moreover to deal with students with the range of a learning style, language skills and abilities Students need to be engaged in different ways some by listening, some by doing and some by watching which makes the learning experience far better.
As assessments are more frequent in lab sessions, it ensures that students are working continually throughout the course rather than trying to learn the whole course for an end of semester exam.
Promoting Student Engagement is another reason why this kind of an implementation has been so beneficial to us. Simply introducing activity into the classroom fails to capture an important component of active learning, the type of activity. For example, influences how much classroom material is retained “Understanding by design” the authors emphasize that good activities developed deep understanding of the important ideas to be learned. To do this the activities must be designed around important learning outcomes and promote thoughtful engagement on the path of the student.
Aside from the main Lab sessions, IT students at BVRIT are also provided the additional subjects where one different subject is taught daily between 1:30 PM and 3.40 PM.
These labs include the following.
Recently with in the “Computer Networks” students were given the task to create a presentation based on the given topics in 6 groups of 10 and asked to present this to a panel of judges which comprised of high qualified teachers and lecturers.
At the end of that presentation the judges were able to give constructive criticism in order to help the students to improve and provide motivation for future work.
Another subject “LINUX Programming”, students were able to develop independent research skills and build on their self learning techniques as sir provided us a set of questions to which we have to find the answer and execute by researching online and discussing with peers.
Next within “Operating Systems” the teacher adopted a motivational teaching approach where we were taught various programming models which we must execute in the labs. During the session we were able to ask questions and clear any doubts before finishing the session.
Next comes “Software Engineering” the students were taken to IBM lab where we were shown motivational video’s, video’s relating to the subject and clips on improving focus.
We were given a task of creating a poster presentation on a topic of our choice in groups of 5 students.
Before creating the poster presentation all grouping students were given the opportunity to speak to our lecturer gain advice and clear any doubts on our chosen topic of interest before creating and presenting.
Overall the IT students at BVRIT are incredibly grateful for being given this unique opportunity to learn in an engaging and motivating environment where diversity and individual thinking is promoted through the use of labs.
From students who were scared of giving presentations in the first week, there was a remarkable change in the following weeks, where they were able to speak up their minds in a more efficient manner. Finally, we would like to thank the Head of Department for coming up with such a great idea and providing with an experience that has help us grow, gain immense knowledge and learn from our own mistakes.
