Prof. Anthony Rossiter

University of Sheffield, UK

Title: Teaching tools and methods for encouraging student engagement without overloading staff

It is well known that students learn more when they are active and thus a core challenge for teaching staff is to encourage effective student activity, both during teaching sessions and also student private study. However, an obvious obstacle is that often, creating effective resources and activities to encourage such engagement can be excessively time consuming for staff, or, simply not easily accessible to students. This talk will demonstrate a number of tools that Anthony has used in his own teaching practice, it must be said with varying success; these aspects will also be discussed honestly. Anthony’s teaching focusses largely around control engineering topics and thus many of the resources are focussed around that, albeit the underlying pedagogical message and approach are transferable to many engineering topics. The talk will also include a significant element on assessment: how can we do this efficiently and thus cope with delivering rapid feedback to large cohorts and minimising inefficient or time consuming marking practices? Also, how do we modernise assessment so it is fit for the 21st century?

1. Turningpoint
2. BB quizzes
3. Threshold assessment
4. MATLAB GUIs/apps
5. End of year exams on computer: exam design, MATLAB and efficient marking, open-book
6. Peer assessment
7. Sympodiums
8. Lecture flipping
9. Take home laboratories

Biography: Anthony Rossiter is at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He received the M.A. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University in 1987 and 1990, respectively. Following a brief postdoctoral position, he obtained his first academic post at Loughborough University in 1992 and subsequently moved to the University of Sheffield in 2001. He is best known for his contributions to predictive control and notably the early work on proposing and understanding dual-mode approaches alongside the foundational ideas and publications behind tube model predictive control. He is also the author of popular textbooks and online resources on predictive control, as well as numerous academic papers. More recently he has served as chair of both the IFAC and IEEE Technical Committees on Control Education and continues in leadership roles in the international control community in promoting the importance of both effective pedagogy and the potential for modern technology to enhance the student learning experience. His open-access teaching resources on the web (https://controleducation.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/) are widely used. His pedagogical work is based on the philosophy of what works effectively that can also be implemented simply and cheaply for both staff and students?