INTO Building Physics (INteractive Teaching Online)

INTO Building Physics project stems from the need to have a higher engagement of the students into the courses offered by the Chair of Building Physics, up to few years ago mainly taught by frontal lessons. Students are observed to be more passive in this teaching method, and it is found that their involvement, is hard to maintain active. Our proposal has been ideated to insert new learning tools aside the classical methods and to reverse, to some extent, the learning process: instead of receiving knowledge, students learn by doing through interactive simulations, videos and online learning platforms, and the classroom-time is rather an exchange moment between students and lecturers, and an occasion, for the first, to present how they approached the topic, before being guided through the solution.
We have been enriching our teaching methods with online tools, switching from taught classes and printed scripts, to a rich Moodle database, online and interactive script, and a new website with simulations and online experiments.
This way we are able to reach all the students, overcoming the physical presence in the classroom, and we stimulate a project-based approach, in sight of their future activities in the job market.

The project aims to provide a matrix of elements oriented to improve the interactivity, the accessibility and the engagement of our teaching methods.
For the Bachelor courses, where high number of students prevent a direct interaction, we have been using a combination of ETH platforms Moodle and Polybook. The content taught in our courses has been structured into 3 interactive ebooks, with a comprehensive theory, interactive exercises and summaries for student’s self-evaluation, external links to self-explorative videos to deepen the topic. These books have been conceived as a collaborative tool: students are allowed to comment specific parts of the book, to correct mistakes, ask for clarifications, suggest improvements. The Polybooks are published into Moodle Courses, where they are flanked by teaching material uploads and by forums, where the students can ask public questions, receive quick answers or start a discussion.
For the Master courses, we have set up some interactive simulations through COMSOL, reproducing Building Physics phenomena, where one can set parameters, see the consequences of design choices, and adjust them to reach a certain objective. These small projects are discussed in class to evaluate the different decisions. Demonstration of laboratory experiments has been collected into eLabs, to instruct students on the methods used in building physics.

During the years, the project has been slightly shifting from the initial plan, oriented to the use of more complex IT resources, to the collaborative work of teachers focusing on improving the teaching methods rather than the tools. We have also tried to employ, as much as possible, the internal resources provided by ETH, i.e. Moodle, Polybook and the ETH Blog.
Concerning the Bachelor courses, students are more interactive than before, they use the forums or the commentary to the Polybooks to participate with questions and suggestions, overcoming the insecurity of participating in a densely populated classroom. We have been tailoring, based on these feedbacks, our content and how we convey knowledge. With big student numbers, it was hard to understand the engagement of the students and if the exercises were useful and understood, until the examination. Using interactive platforms, we have a clearer understanding of how much they participate into the course (through statistics on the accesses), which are the irksome topics, how to improve our content.
A higher success has been reached into the Masters’ courses: likewise, we do not wait the very end of the course to evaluate student’s engagement and understanding, but we use a hands-on approach during the course. Through presentations of short projects, workshops, reports, and discussions in classroom into small groups, we assess how they approach a problem, how they tackle a building physics question, and, especially, we clarify if there is a gap to fill in the theoretical knowledge, before moving into another topic.
Students really appreciate this method, as they feel involved into a “real-world” challenge, rather staying abstract. Presence in class increases, because they are requested to participate into discussions or give presentations.
We have been introducing experiments in the master courses, for instance making students participate into Water Tunnel measurements. This part has also been broadened by filming and explaining experiments in the form of short educational videos (eLabs), from which one can learn how building physics phenomena are simulated and studied.
We have condensed all these inputs, into an online platform, https://blogs.ethz.ch/INTObuildingphysics/ collecting online lectures, eLabs videos, downloadable exercises and simulation apps, with specific tasks to be solved.
This platform is open to ETH users, divided by topics, and it is potentially available to a broader audience; it is supported by a rich Moodle database, where the content is, instead, classified into courses and more focused on specific students’ groups.