A new implementation of keller plan teaching for an undergraduate electronic engineering course

Background: Keller plan teaching is a method of self-paced personalised instruction pioneered half a century ago. It is ideally suited to the STEM fields and others which involve hierarchical knowledge development and are conducive to valid and reliable staged testing. In the '60s and '70s Keller plan teaching (Keller 1968 and Keller 1974) was proved to be more effective although more expensive to implement than standard course delivery methods. A Keller plan approach using the advantages of new technology was devised and given to first year Electronic Engineering undergraduates at La Trobe University. The learning results were compared directly to previous years' intakes (which had taken the course presented using standard techniques) and the results are presented in this paper. Purpose: We sought the answer to the following question: by using the well-established principles of the Keller plan method in combination with the utilisation of newly available IT and casual tutoring staff, is it possible to obtain better learning outcomes at a comparable cost to standard teaching practice? Design/Method: In the first year of operation no lectures were given, tutor-supervised laboratory-based learning being implemented instead. In the second year of the program, one lecture per week was given to allow conceptually difficult topics to be discussed efficiently with a larger group. Students were required to pass as many of the ten basic sequential module tests as possible and there was an optional eleventh module. At the end of the course the students were also given a similar exam to that used in years when standard teaching practice was employed. This was an attempt to have a direct comparison of exam performance with previous years' intakes. The Keller plan module and exam marks, and the exam marks from the two previous years' standard course, were analysed to determine learning outcomes. An independently designed and administered student satisfaction and quality assurance survey was used to establish students' impressions and measure levels of satisfaction and compare those with measures obtained when the course was delivered using standard techniques. Results: Students were more engaged, had a lower dropout rate and felt that they were grasping principles more easily than when taught using standard techniques. Exam results were similar in the first year of the program, but showed a clear improvement in the second year even though the average ATAR entry score for these new students was lower than it had been the previous year. Conclusions: Implementation of Keller plan style courses is now much more practical than it used to be due to the availability of new IT offering flexibility in material presentation and the possibility to track student effort and results. The question posed by this study is answered in the affirmative; it is now possible to achieve better learning outcomes at a comparable cost to standard teaching practice, the on-going Keller plan cost being expected to be about 30% greater than a standard approach.