Personalising teaching and learning experience of built environment students in large groups

One of the persistent problems in the higher education sector is the perpetual predicament of teaching students in large groups. Despite passing over the mass production paradigm in manufacture and service industries, higher education has not yet been quite successful in leaving this paradigm behind. Although theoretically the structure of higher education sector has undergone fundamental changes and the technological advancements support every movement in right directions, there are yet practical problems to overcome on this way. Teaching students in large groups as far as vocational courses are concerned becomes a very critical task and highly prone to disastrous failure, if the practical applications of the taught subjects are not fully taken into account. The problem is even more conspicuous where the concerned group is a blend of students on different courses with allegedly different sets of expectations, preferences, priorities, needs, and wants. Added to these complexities are the learning styles of the individual students. Funded by the Centre for Learning and Teaching, University of Brighton, this research project was designed to gauge the needs and the practical possibilities for personalised learning and teaching logs for individual learners in large groups. The paper reports on partial findings of the research project. It first of all introduces the concept of customisation and personalisation in their context of origin. Then the critical review is expanded to the application of personalisation in learning and teaching environments by highlighting the individual elements in customisation of education. Setting out the module context, the paper then introduces an industry standard test of learning styles to cross-reference the individual preferences with what in particular is required for each course from the students' point of view. It finally concludes with some practical suggestions as well as some executive level recommendations to more efficiently plan, allocate resources, and carry out teaching large groups for achieving higher satisfaction levels.