Tag: learning design

Too many presents

Once upon a time when my daughter was very young, she was given a lot of presents – it was a birthday or Christmas but I can’t remember which. What I do remember is that she played with just one present all day long, leaving all the others untouched.

I think we sometimes do the same thing to our students that friends and family did to Charlotte: we give them too many presents and then get upset when they don’t play with them all.

Let me explain.

Playing with it is one of the main ways to get a deep understanding of concepts and to get fluency with procedures. You ask yourself, “What would happen if…?” and say to yourself, “I wonder…”, and you try things out in different combinations. It’s awesome when it happens and you feel all sorts of positive feelings like curiosity and joy and satisfaction. Even teachers who don’t consciously subscribe to a play-based approach are usually happy when they see this sort of thing happenning. Many of the people who become university lecturers had similar experiences when they were students and assume their students also play with the ideas in their courses.

And the students actually do. It’s amazing how often even the struggling students are trying to explore. And the students who were engaged with the content long before they joined your course are sometimes aching for chances to explore that aren’t being given to them. But there’s a big problem: there’s just not enough time.

A university course has multiple new concepts and procedures every week, and there’s just too many of them to play with all of them. Yet the assignment questions tend to assume a level of familiarity with every single thing in the course that only comes with a decent amount of playing with every one. There’s just too many things in the course to be able to give all of them the time they need. And if a student gets nerdsniped and goes on a deep dive on one thing, they are forced to sacrifice play time with the other things.

I see it most clearly in two places.

First, in a course like Nursing where students are expected to be fluent in all the various ways to do calculations with multiplication and division quickly without a calculator. This fluency comes to most people through years of play: trying new problems, seeing how others do them, noticing strategies worth trying, and noticing when they’re not worth trying, storing away relationships between numbers. But in a first-year Nursing course with students who have past traumatic experiences with maths, there is literally not enough time for this kind of play, even if a student realised that the play was the thing that helped them be better at getting the answer, because they also have to play with how to listen to patients and what all the drugs do and any number of other things that go into becoming a nursing professional.

Second, in a pure maths course for students who chose a pure maths degree because they were interested in pure maths. These students deeply want to play, but there are so many concepts coming at them, there is just not enough time to play with them all, and they feel overwhelmed. Especially when their lecturer assumes unconsciously they have already done the play just because they’ve got previous experience with maths.

My great hope is actually to give students less to play with, so they have time to play with each of them as they go. But failing that, we need to at least not get upset when they don’t play with everything, and definitely not assume that they are lazy or uninterested or ungrateful. They’re just toddlers with too many presents.

7 April, 2026
Making Maths Foundations

NOTE: I wrote this article in September 2025 for the University’s Learning & Teaching News, and I thought I would reproduce it here so other interested people could read it.

Many people feel that their experience with maths up until now prevents them from approaching careers or courses that interest them. For example, a student in an Arts degree might want to become a teacher and must face the government’s numeracy test, or a student in a Music degree might be fascinated by the physics of sound, but intimidated by the calculations involved. The Maths Learning Centre provides an online course called Maths Foundations for just such people. I wanted to share the story of how Maths Foundations was created.

When I got funding in 2023 from PACE (Professional and Continuing Education) to make a course to support students’ maths skills, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. Lack of confidence with number and algebra is the very thing that blocks a lot of people from pursuing various goals, and I wanted a course that helped students build on their earliest maths experiences to foster that confidence.

I began to plan what would be in the course. Based on my extensive experience supporting students at the Maths Learning Centre, I brainstormed the number and algebra skills that would be most useful for people studying various sciences, and for people needing to pass numeracy tests for professional registration such as nurses and teachers. I also considered what would be necessary to move on to the MLC’s bridging course MathTrackX, which can be used in place of Year 12 Maths Methods as a prerequisite for various courses such as maths and engineering.

I took those topics and organised them into four main modules that would allow students to build their number skills and algebra skills at the same time, starting from addition of whole numbers, passing through calculations of areas and volumes and time, and ending with describing lines in the coordinate plane algebraically. The actual process here involved pieces of paper with concepts and skills written on them being physically placed and moved around on the floor and multiple desks. My colleagues and my family were most gracious in accommodating my physical planning process!

The final stage of planning was to use what I had learned from years of interacting with schoolteacher colleagues from early childhood to high school, and choose activities that would help students to learn concepts and practice skills. I was excited to include activities that I know are engaging for people with from a wide range of ages and backgrounds.

Once this planning was done, the hard yards of making the course began. The team from Learning Enhancement & Innovation (LEI) were champions to help me realise my vision. One particularly long process was making all of the videos I imagined. There were many explanatory videos with physical resources from huge fractal art pieces to play-dough to toy dinosaurs to a bottle of honey. I was able to use the Peer Assisted Study Sessions classroom – which was empty for the summer – to lay everything out ready to go and to practise, before recording in the Barr Smith Library recording studio. There were also over forty worked example videos, which were each recorded in one take including all the mistakes, to help students understand the messy process of problem-solving.

On top of the videos, I wrote many pages of text, drew many pictures, created interactive online graphs, designed engaging discussion activities, and coded about seventy randomised practice problem sets. It was a herculean effort, even with the indefatigable support of the LEI team. In April 2024, the course was launched on the AdelaideX platform. Anyone in the world can access the content for free for four weeks, and people can pay for extended access and the opportunity to test themselves with an exam. Now, in September 2025, thousands of students have enrolled, with about 40 so far choosing to complete an exam. There are multiple discussion board posts a day, and MLC lecturer Nicholas Crouch answers them with compassion and verve.

I am so proud of what I have built, so grateful for the support I had to build it, and so glad students are finding it useful.

24 September, 2025
Leaving the most important teaching to chance

Something is bothering me about teaching at university: we are leaving the most important teaching to chance.

In most tutorials, there is an opportunity to try out things with a tutor there to talk to about it, or deep discussion of course content, or at the very least worked examples of using the ideas in practice with a higher chance of asking questions. In a lot of ways the tutorial is the place where the majority of the classroom learning actually happens in a university course. Indeed, students often say that tutorials are the most important part of their learning at university and will go to them even if they don’t go to lectures. I talked to a student just the other day who was still catching up watching the lectures online from two months ago, and yet has been able to do his assignments because he has been attending the tutorials.

So, if the tutorial is the most important class for student learning, then you would think that the tutorial would be the class where you put the most effort into making sure it was as good as you could achieve. Yet in so many disciplines in so many universities, the tutorials are given to their current postgrad students to teach, with minimal or no training. (Not to say the postgrad students can’t be great teachers, just to say they don’t have much teaching experience yet.) By not carefully considering our tutorials and training the tutors, it’s like we’re leaving the most important teaching to chance.

Even more than this, most initiatives to improve teaching at university focus on the lecturers. We give support for designing what happens in lectures and online, but somehow we don’t provide any time or resources for training the hundreds of tutors running the thousands of tutorials. Again, we spend all this effort improving lectures, but leave the most important teaching to itself.

This really surprises me, and I really wish there was something I could do about it. What I wish for is a funnelling of funding into designing effective teaching in tutorials, and even more importantly, funnelling funding into training tutors in effective teaching in tutorials. I think this might have a huge impact on learning at university.

25 May, 2018
Book Reading: The Classroom Chef
Over the weekend, I read “The Classroom Chef” by John Stevens and Matt Vaudrey. This is a post about my reaction to the book.

(You can read this blog post and all other Book Reading posts in PDF form here. )

The premise of the book is to use cooking in a restaurant as a metaphor for constructing teaching in a classroom. It’s a good metaphor, and executed well. Warm up routines are “appetisers”, being prepared is “setting the table”, creating curiosity before giving answers is “entree”, things you do to make life more fun in the classroom are “side dishes”, and assessment is “dessert”. The commitment to the metaphor is even more impressive than that, with the contents page called the “menu” and the references section called “secret ingredients”. Just looking at the menu was enough for me to want to read the book more closely.

The major messages the book seemed to be getting at were the following:
- Don’t be afraid to really love maths in front of your students.
- Give students the chance to show you how they understand in their own way. Posters and videos don’t feel fun for everyone when they are being assessed on it.
- Set things up in your class activities so students are curious about something. It doesn’t have to be “real world” and it definitely doesn’t have to be serious, it just has to have a question that needs an answer. Some silliness and shock value will make it taste better, but the setup for curiosity is the really important bit.
- It’s a risk to try something new with your teaching, but your students will appreciate it and you can’t learn without it.
It’s only a short book, so it didn’t go too deeply into any of those, though there’s probably more examples of the ideas in action on the companion website. But still I reckon classroom teachers would get something good out of it.

Unfortunately, for me, I had trouble as I read this book because early on John and Matt described their early teaching experiences and it brought back a whole lot of unpleasant memories for me. Their description of the days when they felt that perhaps teaching wasn’t for them actually made me cry with my own memory of feeling the same way. The worst part was that I knew Matt and John stuck with it and are now writing books about teaching, whereas I left. My first school I quit before the end of my first year there (there were a number of reasons for this), and the second school I stuck out the full year, but at the end of that I went back to uni to do my PhD in geometry.

Continuing to read the book, Matt and John talk a lot about being brave enough to take risks in the classroom. I am sorry to say that all this did was make me feel like my own reaction to these early stresses was chickening out. I felt like I had been a coward and let down the students I could have had by leaving teaching. Moreover, as they describe some of the fun things they did in their classrooms, I think back to some of the similar things I did and wonder if there was something wrong with me that they didn’t make a huge difference to how I felt about teaching.

Thinking about it more, I have found one possible factor that made my experience different to Matt and John’s: support. In the book, they both describe the support they received from their school leadership and from instructional coaches in their early years of teaching, sometimes without them having to ask for this support. I had neither of those things at my first school. At my first school, I was it for maths and science and my principal was a bully who repeatedly undermined me to the students when I was not in the room and attacked my relationship with my wife. At my second school, it was better since there were more other teachers to lean on, but still I was pushing against a curriculum leader who actually said aloud that maths was “a collection of problems and a procedure to solve each one”, and a school leadership who weren’t committed to helping me improve, only to telling me I needed to. Plus, this was before Twitter, so there was no #MTBoS.

Looking back, I think the critical lack of support was one of the major causes of me giving up on teaching high school. Reading the descriptions of support in this book made me weep for poor past David. Of course I know that it has all turned out for the best because it has meant that here I am at Uni doing the best job in the world, but I couldn’t say totally enjoyed the experience of reading it. Sorry Matt and John.

UPDATE: Check out John’s reply at his own blog – follow the link below.

This comment was left on the original blog post:

John Stevens 20 November 2016:

David,

Thank you for this. Rather than dropping a big reply here, I blogged about it:
http://www.fishing4tech.com/fishin-solo-blog/shoulders
14 November, 2016
But I don’t like cricket
When I was in primary school, one of my teachers once tried to teach us averages using cricket, and it is one of my strongest memories of being thoroughly confused in maths class.

I’m pretty sure my teacher thought that using cricket to teach averages was a great idea, but (for me at least) it was a very bad idea, for three main reasons. First, I didn’t actually know the all rules of how cricket was scored. I had played cricket before, but this amounted to hitting when I was supposed to hit, running when I was supposed to run, and trying to catch when I was supposed to catch. I had never actually scored anything or been told how this was done. So all his discussion of average scores was basically meaningless to me. Second, there’s this technical detail in cricket batting averages that has to include “not out” somehow, which makes it not like normal averages. He spent most of his lesson discussing this detail and I ended up not knowing what a traditional average was, letalone a cricket average. Third, and most importantly, I didn’t like cricket. As an exercise-induced asthmatic, the running wasn’t pleasant. As someone with low coordination, I tended to be out pretty quickly as a batter, and so spend a lot of time just sitting on the bench. And as a fielder, well, the chance of actually interacting with the game as a fielder in primary-level cricket is quite low. So the mere mention of cricket turned me off. If cricket is what averages are for, then I really didn’t want to know about averages.

And this story embodies the dangers of using “real life applications” to teach maths:
- Students don’t know the context: If students aren’t familiar with the context of the application, the discussion will be meaningless to them, which often leaves you teaching the context itself rather than the maths.
- The context is too complex: Most contexts are more complex than the thing you are trying to teach, and to deal with this complexity, you often cloud whatever it was you were trying to teach (or end up changing the context so much it doesn’t make sense any more).
- Students might be turned off by the context: The application itself has a high chance of simply not being interesting to the students at hand, and they will transfer this disinterest to the maths.
All three dangers are real and present in every classroom, especially the third one. Yet I have lost count of the number of people who have responded to the question of “how do I motivate my students to learn topic X” with “just tell them about application Y”. No-one seems to recognise the possibility of disengaging students by telling them about application Y.

I’m not entirely sure what to do about it, unfortunately. If you have a group of students at university who are all studying the same degree (say Mechanical Engineering), then you have a good chance of picking an application they will be interested in, but even then almost always you have the second danger of complexity getting in the way. You could conceivably get the students themselves to seek out applications of the concept to things they personally are interested in, but some maths concepts simply aren’t used in varied enough places. And you could just show them a huge number of different applications so that they are sure to be interested in at least one of them (a linear algebra lecturer recently did this with eigenvalues). But of course, you yourself would have to know all these applications.

In the end, I think we need be aware of the dangers so we can keep an eye out for students disengaging. Also, I think we need to make sure that the students are comfortable with the maths itself, and we need to be excited about the maths itself, whether we use a real-life application or not. Then the students who don’t like cricket might be able to be interested in just the maths.
25 September, 2015
Sleeping through Miss Marple

My wife and I like to watch mystery shows together like Poirot, Midsomer Murders and Miss Marple. Unfortunately I have a slight problem: when watching television in a comfortable position, I tend to drift in and out of sleep, no matter how interesting the show might be. This can be quite disasterous for mystery shows, especially ones with major unexpected plot twists.

Just yesterday we were watching an episode of Marple called The Pale Horse and I woke up from a doze at the scene where everyone was gathered in the dining room to reveal the killer. And I had not the slightest clue what was going on.

Later I went back to see the bits I had missed and it turned out I had missed a total of about three minutes of viewing in small snippets, but these were precisely the key moments I needed to be able to follow that final revelation.

This morning it occurs to me that some students I have helped in the MLC have been in a similar position with their maths courses. A particularly common example is in Maths 1A too with the word “span”. It is mentioned in passing in one of the early Algebra lectures, with the discussion lasting for a total of about a minute, and it doesn’t seem related to the content of the course at the time. But then later it becomes one of the most important ideas and is talked about as if they already know what it is. If they “slept through” the first mention, they’d be most confused! It happens in our own bridging course too, with the idea of a “unit vector”. It’s mentioned on precisely two pages in our course materials, and is very easy to miss. Students almost always completely ignore the word in their assignment and then struggle to get what we are asking them to do. (This is one of the reasons we hope to rewrite the resources in future.)

As teachers, we need to remember that a maths course is not like a murder mystery. In a murder mystery it’s the fact that working out the case hinges on small details that makes it mysterious and fun. But maths courses don’t hinge upon small details, they hinge upon big ideas. We need to make sure that anything pivotal is mentioned several times and discussed deeply so that even if their attention wanders for a minute once, they can still pick it up again and still follow the story.

15 April, 2015
Give good teaching a go

It was the Uni of Adelaide Festival of Learning and Teaching last week, and as always there was a string of people telling us about the great things they’re doing with their teaching. As much as it can get a bit weary sitting through presentations all day, I really do love seeing that there are people excited about doing their best for student learning.

There are two of these people that I want to hold up high as a shining example, and they are Catherine Snelling and Sophie Karanicolas from the School of Dentistry. They have won all these awards for their good teaching, but this is not what I think is the exciting thing. The exciting thing is that they did it through good old fashioned giving it a go.

They thought it would be a good idea to have videos for their students to view, and they didn’t wait for a professional to shoot it for them or to have professional voice training, they just set up a camera and recorded themselves at the whiteboard. They thought it would be a good idea to have students talk to them online, and they didn’t bother to build a whiz-bang tool to do so, they just found out where their students already were on Facebook. Finally, they thought it would be good for the students to see detailed diagrams of dental anatomy, and they didn’t go out to buy fancy state-of-the-art teaching tools, but simply drew really good diagrams in colour on the board.

When you listen to these two people speak you can tell they love to help students learn and that they believe that anything is possible. It was impossible for me not to be inspired by their infectious can-do attitude.

You can do good teaching. Just give it a go!

20 November, 2014
Quadric Cameo

As I said recently, quadrics hold a special place in my heart and I get excited every time the topic comes around in Maths 1B. Quadrics have so many cool things you can say about them, and are such a great opportunity to talk about the deep connection between algebra and geometry. I personally could teach an entire 12 week course on nothing else. But paradoxically, this is also why I feel a sense of frustration every time the topic comes around in Maths 1B.

You see, quadrics have such a short appearance in Maths 1B – just long enough to be an application of orthogonal diagonalisation, but not long enough to get anything close to understanding them. To have even a slight feeling that you understand quadrics, you actually need to spend a bit of time near them investigating how they behave, but there’s barely long enough to learn half their names (indeed, I’m told that this semester they’re not going to be expected to know their names for the exam at all).

Some people might say this isn’t a problem because the students can just learn the bits they’re told and leave it at that. But the students have been told so many times that it’s better to understand things than just do them, and have failed in the past when they took a surface approach to maths, so they try to understand things if they can. Plus, many of them can see that quadrics might actually be quite interesting and they want to understand.

Normally I would rejoice that students had a desire to understand something I love, but in this case, when quadrics are such a tiny bit of their course, it stops them putting energy into other, more mark-worthy bits of the course. Like the Dufflepuds in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie, I would prefer that either we did them the justice they deserve or left them out entirely.

14 October, 2013
When will they see the most important bit?

For the past two years, I’ve been involved in the design and teaching of the statistics curriculum to the 3rd year medical students, and I have to say it’s been very rewarding. Most of my job involves helping students who have been taught by someone else somewhere else and who haven’t had the best experience of it, but with this project I’ve been able to make their actual experience of the teaching better in the first place. (Not that I would trade in helping all the other students, of course!)

But it hasn’t been without its challenges, the main one being that I only get seven lectures to teach them the stats. That’s seven periods of 50 minutes with no other contact with the students, as opposed to the 24-36 lectures, 10-12 tutorials, 10-12 computer practicals and 5-10 assignments you get in a traditional stats course.

Needless to say, I have had to make some big decisions about what I choose to tell them and what I choose not to tell them. I have had to think hard about what is the most important thing I could possibly tell them about stats and choose to say only that and do it well. They may never get another chance to hear that information, so I need to make sure they get it now.

“Wow, David,” you must be thinking, “that must be tough. I’m so glad I do have 60 hours of time with my students.”

But do you really have 60 hours of time with your students? What if they work full time and can’t come to any of the tutes or pracs? What if they had an accident and suddenly couldn’t come to the rest of the course? What if you got sick and couldn’t teach them any more? What if there was an earthquake and your university was closed for the rest of the year? What if they simply decided they weren’t going to come any more? (The med students are famous for this last one.)

We really don’t know how long we’ve got with them, so it seems to me that we should all seize the day and tell them the most important bits now, before it’s too late. If you get longer with them, then be grateful you can go into more detail, but even if you don’t, you’ll know they’ve come away with something good.

This comment was left on the original blog post:

Joleen Hall 12 July 2013:
I think one of the benefits those students get is you as their teacher. You explain concepts and techniques in a way that opens students up to learning. As an aspiring teacher I will aim to be half as good as you at teaching my students and making maths fun, as there is nothing like the real thing. I hope the uni values you as an educator as much as the students do.

12 July, 2013
The one most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students’ lives better
MyUni (known as “blackboard” to people not at Uni of Adelaide), is a powerful tool for supporting your students’ learning. There are a whole lot of awesome things you can use it to do: use discussion boards, have virtual classrooms, set up group assessment, student wikis, and the list goes on. The bread-and-butter of MyUni is of course to put up the lecture notes, assignments and prac instructions.

And this brings me to the most important thing you can do in MyUni to make your students’ lives better: label everything properly. And not just any labels – descriptive labels.

Let me illustrate with some examples:

Example 1

Imagine yourself as a student doing your assignment and needing to remember how to, say, produce a QQ plot in SPSS. You remember that you had a computer prac at some point in the past where you learned to do that, and that the prac instructions told you how. So you go to the part of MyUni where all the prac instructions are. And you are faced with the following picture to the left.

And now you have to go through every prac one at a time, dowloading one pdf after another, to find where the instructions are. You have an intense feeling that perhaps it’s just not worth it.

If only the lecturer had labelled them with a description of what was in them! something like this:
- Prac 1: Entering and importing data, saving data
- Prac 2: Descriptive stats, graphs, importing into Word
- Prac 3: Labelling categories, making tables, drawing scatterplots, calculating regression
- and so on…
Then you as a student would be able to find the instructions yourself and not have to ask for help, or worse, just give up.

Example 2

Imagine yourself as a student studying for your exam. You have been going through your assignments and you find that you really need to go over the topic “integration by parts”. So you decide to go and watch the appropriate lecture recording.

You go to the part of MyUni where the lecture recordings are and you see the picture to the left. There is a list of the lectures at the bottom, but they are organised by date. You don’t have dates in your own personal lecture notes because you organise them by topic, since that fits with your learning style. How on earth are you supposed to know which one is the one about integration by parts? You’re not about to watch the first ten minutes of ALL of them to figure it out!

If only the lecturer had put each individual lecture as its own item with a little description of what it was about, you’d have a much easier time as a student. Indeed, you’d get a really good picture of what was going on in the course if for some reason you were forced to miss some lectures. (It would be even better if the MyMedia setup allowed lecturers to choose descriptive titles for each lecture at the time they recorded it, which was automatically included in the info here…)

Example 3

Imagine yourself as a student trying to do an assignment. You remember that you lent your lecture notes to a friend earlier in the day, so you go into MyUni to download the slides. You know you are particularly looking for the bit on Indifference Curves, but when you go to the bit with the slides you see this:

You know it’s one of Module E, F or G, but which one? If only there was a description of what was in each lecture, you might actually be able to choose which one. And in fact you might possibly get an appreciation of what the whole course looks like since the topic list would be right there. As it is, you waste precious time, and vow never to lend your notes to your friends ever again.

Conclusion

Do you see how important this one thing is? Do you see just how annoying it can be for a student to have to deal with a lack of labelling, and how it can actually seriously impede their learning? Do you see how proper labelling might actually smooth the way for the students to become more independent?

This is why I think it is the one most important thing you can do to label everything properly. Lecture notes, lecture recordings, practical notes, assignments, tutorials – everything. It really will help your students learn more than you will ever know.

So please, label everything clearly in MyUni!

This comment was left on the original blog post:

Ryan Hattam 18 January 2013:

Hi

Great advice! As a former student and now a MyUni Admin I’ve been in to many courses, and agree completely with the 3 examples!

A couple of points on example 2:
In MyMedia a lecturer can include notes when they record. There is a notes field on the MyMedia Capture Application in lecture theatres, and on the file upload screen of the website.
You can enter as much or as little text as you like. This text is then viewable and editable on mymedia.adelaide.edu.au with the other session editing capabilities.
This text is then automatically included when you embed an individual session on a page.

We experiemented with a few ways to get the note text on the playlist, but because of the arbitary size the text could be, it was tricky to keep the playlist a certain size. Just showing the note of the current playing video was investigated, but it didnt really solve the problem! However, if you click on ‘download links +’ below the playlist, you get the download links, with recording names and the notes! The recording names match up with the names in the playlist, so you can locate the right one and select it.

The next iteration of the playlist will hopefully include the notes inline, reducing the step of expanding the download links to read them!

-Ryan
26 October, 2012

Tag: learning design

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Conclusion