Many people believe that engineering subjects require only mathematical and physical abilities as well as space perception. However, some aspects of the syllabus, must be memorized to achieve optimal academic results. The pandemic situation has meant a reduction in face-to-face classes, which has made it difficult to highlight (through repetition by teachers) those concepts that must be learnt by heart
due to their importance.
As is well known, the Notecard Question and Answer Technique (NQAT, based on Leitner’s system) helps students to learn those important ideas that must be kept in the long term memory to remember when needed. Therefore, an educational project is presented here that contemplates the creation of a database of question-answer cards to facilitate the memorization of concepts, formulas and key values of different parameters essential for understanding coastal engineering problems. The methodology was experimented in different courses, related to Coastal and Port Engineering. These courses are included in the third year of the Marine Sciences and Civil Engineering Bachelor degrees as well as in the MSc degree in the University of Cadiz. The program chosen was the ANKI, of broad application, easy to use and free to access. As a collateral advantage, students became familiar with this software and were able to use it in other subjects. Through a selective distribution of the different topics, all the students participated in the task of preparing the cards. Their use was encouraged by a series of online tests and a “supplementary bonus” to the final examination.
The results obtained between the current course (with flash cards) and the previous one (without flash cards) did not show any substantial change in the number of students who pass the subject. However, students reported that it took less time to memorize formulations and key concepts

Contreras de Villar, Antonio

Contreras de Villar, Francisco

Jigena Antelo, Bismarck

López García,  Patricia

Muñoz Pérez, Juan José

English

Repositorio de Objetos de Docencia e Investigación de la Universidad de Cádiz

  USE OF THE ANKI SOFTWARE IN COASTAL ENGINEERING COURSES: METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS Juan J. Muñoz-Perez, Antonio Contreras, Bismarck Jigena, Francisco Contreras, Patricia Lopez Coastal Engineering Research Group, University of Cadiz (SPAIN) Abstract Many people believe that engineering subjects require only mathematical and physical abilities as well as space perception. However, some aspects of the syllabus, must be memorized to achieve optimal academic results. The pandemic situation has meant a reduction in face-to-face classes, which has made it difficult to highlight (through repetition by teachers) those concepts that must be learnt by heart due to their importance.  As is well known, the Notecard Question and Answer Technique (NQAT, based on Leitner’s system) helps students to learn those important ideas that must be kept in the long term memory to remember when needed. Therefore, an educational project is presented here that contemplates the creation of a database of question-answer cards to facilitate the memorization of concepts, formulas and key values of different parameters essential for understanding coastal engineering problems. The methodology was experimented in different courses, related to Coastal and Port Engineering. These coursed are included in the third year of the Marine Sciences and Civil Engineering Bachelor degrees as well as in the MSc degree in the University of Cadiz. The program chosen was the ANKI, of broad application, easy to use and free to access. As a collateral advantage, students became familiar with this software and were able to use it in other subjects. Through a selective distribution of the different topics, all the students participated in the task of preparing the cards. Their use was encouraged by a series of online tests and a “supplementary bonus” to the final examination.  The results obtained between the current course (with flash cards) and the previous one (without flash cards) did not show any substantial change in the number of students who pass the subject. However, students reported that it took less time to memorize formulations and key concepts. Keywords: Educational Innovation, Technical Education, Tutorials, Pedagogy, NQAT, ANKI.  1 INTRODUCTION  Throughout these last years, academic plans in Spain have changed to fit in with the new European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Thus, good practices and values must be established not only to follow European criteria and guidelines, but to guarantee the quality of higher education [1]. This means a change in the educational methodologies by the substitution of excessively theoretical teaching by a more practical training and education as well as the use of new technologies [2]. To achieve it, students must be involved in the learning process [3]. Therefore, Spanish universities are implementing information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the teaching/learning process. Hence, students are encouraged to try new working methodologies through ICT (v.g Tagalou et al., [4]). Within university education, engineering grades have a deserved fame of high number of failures. Engineering subjects have a difficulty inherent to their very nature, especially those related to physical-mathematical equations. In order to improve this ratio, different methodologies have been applied all over the world [5]. For instance, amongst others, audiovisual resources [6], use of GPS and Google Earth [7], development of tutorials [8], literature search [9], science history and gender [10], aerial photographs [11], naturalization [12], problem based learning [13], “semi-attendance” technique [14], training in specific vocabulary [15], return of the “rules of thumb” [16] and other methods [17-19], have contributed to increase the number of students that pass these engineering subjects [20]. Coastal Engineering (CE) is one of the subject taught into the Civil Engineering degree. There are a lot of coastal processes whose interpretation can be difficult for engineering students who come for the first time to this topic, v.g. [21-23]. Moreover, not only mathematical and physical abilities are required. Some aspects of the syllabus must be learnt by heart to achieve the best academic results. However, the pandemic situation has meant a reduction in face-to-face lectures, which has made it difficult to highlight (through repetition) those important concepts that must be memorized. Proceedings of EDULEARN22 Conference 4th-6th July 2022, Palma, Mallorca, SpainISBN: 978-84-09-42484-90944  In order to help students to remember those important ideas, a methodology has been introduced: the Notecard Question and Answer Technique (NQAT), based in the Leitner’s system [24]. It employs the concept of spaced repetition, i.e. memorization that uses time intervals. Therefore, an educational project was launched where a database of question-answer cards was created to facilitate the memorization of concepts, formulas and key values of different parameters essential for understanding coastal engineering problems. The methodology was experimented in different courses, related to Coastal and Port Engineering. These courses are included in the third year of two Bachelor degrees (Marine Sciences and Civil Engineering) as well as in a MSc degree in the University of Cadiz.  Hence, the aim of this paper is to present an innovative e-teaching project based on the use of the NQAT and the analysis of the improvements (if any) in the learning of the Coastal Engineering subject. 2 METHODOLOGY The Spaced Repetition System is based on the premise that the bits of knowledge are better memorized in the long-term when the memorization exercises are performed in short intervals of time. Furthermore, the frequency of repetition decreases as knowledge becomes fixed. The software chosen was the ANKI, of broad application, easy to use and free to access (https://apps.ankiweb.net/). It is content-agnostic and supports images, audio and videos. A distribution of the different topics was made to let all the students to participate in the task of preparing the flash cards. The cards were reviewed by the professors prior to their upload to the virtual classroom. Their use was encouraged by a series of online tests included in the virtual classroom meaning a “supplementary bonus” to the final examination system.  The Teaching Innovation project obtained a grant from the University of Cadiz which allows the hiring of a student to help in the presentation of the software, in the revision of the material and in the preparation of surveys and treatment of their results.  According to the methodology presented by Marin-Paz and Casado-Arjona [25], two surveys were distributed before the flash cards were performed, while the last one was completed on the day of the examination. The questions allowed to obtain data about: - Number of students (%) who participated in the creation of the flash cards  - % of students who already knew this method - % of students who already had used this method - % of students who used them to prepare for the subject exam - % of students who considered it to be a useful tool - % of students who will continue to use it 3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION As already mentioned, the study was conducted in three courses, two undergraduate (Marine Sciences and Civil Engineering) and a MEng. Results of the surveys are presented in table 1. First of all, it should be noted that there are no major differences between the three courses (the standard deviation of the results did not exceed 10% in any case). Most of the students (92% in the average) participated in the creation of the flash cards (218 were created), though almost nobody had ever listened about this method and, therefore, had ever used it. It should be also noted that the use of the flash cards was encouraged by some online tests included in the virtual classroom, as a part of the continuous assessment and as a “supplementary bonus” to the final examination system. The participation of the students was slightly lower in the degree of marine sciences due to the also slightly lower class attendance. On the other hand, the participation was absolute in the master probably due to the smaller number of students (10 versus 70, approximately).  Similarly, 90% average of the students used them to prepare for the exam. Moreover, the same percentage of students considered it to be a useful tool and will continue to use it in the future. Despite the fact that the surveys are anonymous and students are reminded of this before taking them, it is not ruled out that a certain part of the answers were not completely honest, trying to “please the professor”. 0945  For instance, Park and Cheong [26] already established the existence of response patterns and how some of these types of behaviour are the indication of satisficing, affecting the credibility/reliability of the responses. Table 1. Results of the surveys  Marine Sciences Bachelor Civil Engineering Bachelor Coastal Eng. Master Average Standard Deviation Students who … % % % % % Participated in the creation of the flash cards 84 92 100 92,0 8,0 Already knew this method 5 4 10 6,3 3,2 Already had used this method 2 2 10 4,7 4,6 Used them to prepare for the exam 80 90 100 90,0 10,0 Considered it to be a useful tool 80 90 100 90,0 10,0 Will continue to use it 80 90 100 90,0 10,0 The results of the grades obtained between the current course (with flash cards) and the previous one (without flash cards) have also been compared (see table 2). As can be seen, the results did not show a substantial increase in the number of students who passed the subject. No improvement in grades was detected either. However, students reported that it took less time to memorize formulations and key concepts. Table 2. Comparison of the results obtained with and without flash cards in two different years (percentage)  fail pass B (5-6) A (7-8) A* (9-10) Flash cards No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes Marine Sciences Bachelor 8 10 92 90 18 15 46 44 28 31 Civil Engineering Bachelor 21 18 79 82 24 23 39 41 16 18 Coastal Engineering Master 0 10 100 90 0 0 50 40 50 50 4 CONCLUSIONS Results of an innovative e-teaching project based on the use of the NQAT, also known as the spaced repetition model or Leitner’s system, is presented here. This methodology has been applied to the learning of the Coastal Engineering subject in three courses.   No major differences were found between the different courses. Most of the students, 90% average, used the flash cards to prepare for the exam. Furthermore, the same percentage considered the software interesting and consider to use it in the future.  The results of the grades obtained between the current course (with flash cards) and the previous one (without flash cards) did not show any substantial change in the number of students who passed the subject or any improvement in the grades either. However, students reported that it took less time to memorize formulations and key concepts. It should be highlighted that almost nobody had ever listened previously about this method. Thus, as a collateral advantage, students learnt to use the ANKI software and were eager to use it in other subjects. 0946  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  The student who helped carry out the study was hired thanks to a grant from the University of Cadiz. REFERENCES  [1] J. Carrasco-Gallego, C. Hernández-Rubio (2010). “Adaptation of the University tutorial programs to the EHEA”. EDULEARN10 Proceedings, pp. 2028-2036. [2] R. Kaushalya, B. Raju, H. Hemlanaik, S. Jaganath (2009). “Emerging technologies in Education”. EDULEARN09 Proceedings, pp. 5067-5073. [3] L. 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Use of the ANKI Software in Coastal Engineering Courses: Methodology and Results

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Use of the ANKI Software in Coastal Engineering Courses: Methodology and Results

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