Description

This Learning Platform functions as a bridge between students and teachers and facilitates communication between them. It is used as an external channel to get students’ attention and interest other than the one-way assimilation in lessons. It also provides a channel for students to get access to the most updated cases and allows students to express their knowledge acquired and thoughts on the taught topics. Some interest-based learning materials related to facility layout planning have been designed and uploaded to the Platform to provide a channel for students to obtain self-learning materials through their mobile devices. IMLP could also be served as a supplementary teaching material for facility layout planning topics in several undergraduate subjects. From this platform teachers can collect students’ performance data, which could be used to investigate into students’ learning weaknesses.

Example of Application

A total of 60 students, who had learned the concepts of facility layout planning, were invited to use the platform. These 60 students were then divided into 4 different groups to try and evaluate the platform. A tablet PC (iPad) with pre-installed case scenario was used as an interactive platform for collecting students’ performance data.

Based on the data, some students were capable of mastering the knowledge that was learned in the lectures. Group 1 had the best performance. Therefore, for Group 1, the pedagogy given to this group was to consolidate their performance and support them to achieve a deeper understanding of the topic. A level-up case scenario with an increased number of functional unit s and hidden information was distributed to Group 1 in order to sustain their good performance. Students in Groups 2 and 3 could master most of the concepts and put them into applications. Most students in these 2 groups made careless mistakes on either calculations or relationship recognitions of the functional units. Therefore, the pedagogy given to these 2 groups was to improve their calculation accuracy and relationship identification technique by intensive practices on similar learning scenarios. By modifying the numbers and relocating the relationship of the functional units, hopefully students will find it easier to get themselves familiar with the calculation operations and relationship recognition to minimize careless mistakes they have made in the assessment.

In other words, based on the different performances of these 4 groups, different pedagogies were offered to sustain and improve their learning performance. IMLP is able to provide timely feedback on student’s performance. On IMLP, students could alter their layouts. All the participated students in Groups 1, 2 & 3 could sustain and achieve better learning performance on a similar layout planning quiz with and alternated number in material flow rate. It was observed that the 9 students in Group 4 did not show any improvement in the second trial. They did not actively participate in the tutorial group.

Evaluation/ Comments

Self evaluation was conducted after the pilot run of the platform. A survey was conducted with 20 first-time users of the platform. It was found that students could consolidate their learned concepts and gain real-life practical opportunities through a casual game on a mobile device. It was also found that IMLP has the potential to engage students in and support their learning.