Multi-disciplinary soil mechanics

The course «Bodenmechanik» has been run since 2000 in IGT, gaining consistently high marks from student evaluations. Since 2007, it has been extended for several different versions of Masters› courses in English. Parallel frontal lectures, online quizzes and compulsory laboratory demonstrations are current resources, and most of these Masters› courses are running at capacity. IGT has been unable to expand them to meet the demands of other ETH Zürich departments, which also seek a platform to teach their students soil mechanics. To improve the efficiency, and offer a range of innovative learning opportunities, IGT will develop novel e-resources in English from pod- and vod-casts (to be embedded in existing mindmaps) and online laboratory guides to expand on a successful online learning platform (GEOTip). This will empower students to access a variety of resources, each fulfilling several different didactic needs. Lectures in English will be filmed and implemented online together with a discussion forum. This will permit greater numbers of students from a variety of engineering and science backgrounds to benefit from a quality education in soil mechanics, both in English and German, according to their respective needs and learning styles, while using the same core learning materials.

• Easily maintained and accessed tutorials for students
• Reduced requirements of Professorial time
• Student lead learning – ensures students can learn at their own speed

Student led learning allowing expansion of topics from a central mindmap to streamline studies.

The sound quality was less high in some recordings than others due to a mixture of lower quality equipment being used at the beginning of the project and the lecturer contracting a bad cold on one of the days of recording. If such a project were to be repeated it would make sense to invest in higher quality recording equipment.

Ongoing – however unofficial feedback obtained from masters and PhD students during quality control was positive. Students liked being able to revisit some of the more complex ideas and theories more than once and greatly benefitted from being led through worked examples in a way that is not possible through explanations that are only written.

• Planning – writing storyboards for any recorded lecture or tutorial
• Quality control performed by people outside the project