Kathleen Touton, a drafting instructor at Lanier Technical College, gets students excited about her course through the use of learning activities and games. It happens from the first day of class, where flash cards and self-assessments created with StudyMate are used to help students learn core concepts for the course.
“I want my students to have an immediate, engaging connection with the course content,” Kathleen explains. “Students quickly get the idea that the course is interactive, that it requires their immediate involvement. With the StudyMate activities, students start learning immediately and it helps avoid the situation where they cram to learn material just prior to an exam.”
Kathleen says the success with StudyMate activities is that students don’t even think of it as learning. “They don’t always realize that by learning basic terminology and concepts in this way, they’ve established a great foundation for the rest of the course. It’s only at the end of the term that they realize how far they’ve come and how much they’ve learned. And, yes, their grades reflect it too.”
While there are many things that contribute to a successful course, Kathleen gets excited when she hears students talk about StudyMate in class. It piques the interest of other students and gets them to try it. Students also like that they can use StudyMate on their smart phones and iPads. The initial intrigue might be the cool factor, she admits, but it’s increasingly becoming how students want to learn. It’s nice to be able to offer that option.
Across campus, Debbie Evans teaches an online Criminal Justice course that focuses on the Bill of Rights, a subject that’s tough to get students excited about, she says. Debbie started using StudyMate as a learning supplement to summarize key concepts for each chapter in the textbook and to provide quizzes after each reading. “The course material is complex and builds upon itself,” she says, “so it’s critical that students understand the earlier material and don’t fall behind.”
To encourage students to use StudyMate early in the term, Debbie gives students extra points if they review the StudyMate activities prior to a quiz. StudyMate Class has tracking capabilities, so it’s easy to see which students interacted with StudyMate and to what extent. Once students realize that the learning activities and games help them master the concepts quickly and perform well on quizzes, they become hooked on StudyMate.
Debbie points to a specific example where the StudyMate learning activities and self-assessments made a huge impact for a student. “One of my students had academic struggles that were partially due to a learning disability.” She explains that StudyMate enabled him to try activities repeatedly, even switching to a different activity to learn the same material. For example, he might start with Flash Cards but then run through the same material using the Fill in the Blank or Matching activities.
“The payoff was immediately visible,” she said. “His scores went from C’s to A’s.” The student then started asking other professors to use StudyMate in their classes.
Two instructors, two stories. One teaches a traditional face-to-face course, the other an online course. Their common theme is to get students to learn key concepts early in the course. They don’t want students to fall behind because it’s impossible to build knowledge without a foundation. StudyMate helps students master the basics, and it does it in a way that captures student interest and makes a noticeable impact on learning outcomes.
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