Individual oral tutorial presentations have been utilised in numerous undergraduate courses to develop and assess students’ skills in organising and communicating ideas and information to a select audience. However, evidence from the literature, interviews with academics (n=5), and the author’s own experiences have demonstrated that these presentations have been plagued with issues ranging from poor quality presentations to non-attendance on the part of students and boredom for both academics and undergraduates alike. This article highlights these issues, then details a variety of successful ways in which academics have innovated to improve the level of student engagement and facilitate a higher achievement of learning outcomes. Some of these innovations pertain to individual presentations, yet interview data gathered indicated a strong trend towards replacing these with small group and whole group exercises, models for which are also explicated in this article. These models have been drawn from the Social Sciences and Humanities and provide templates that may be adapted for use in a range of different contexts. The resultant improvements in co-ordinating undergraduate students’ tutorial presentations may contribute towards a more satisfying experience for lecturers, tutors, and students, and improved learning outcomes.
This article traces the genealogy of colonial raupo buildings in New Zealand, and also charts their decline. This decline was in part attributable to the passage of the colony’s earliest building legislation, ‘an ordinance for imposing a tax upon raupo houses’. It draws on census data and settler reminiscences to demonstrate that collective memory of raupo houses became essential to settler New Zealand as a benchmark against which to measure colonial progress. It also shows how, in the early decades of the twentieth century, health concerns were mobilized as the official rationale for both the removal from raupo houses of those few Pākehā who continued to occupy them, and the wholesale destruction of many Māori-occupied raupo homes. By the 1930s, few New Zealanders continued to occupy raupo houses, and their extensive use by early colonists was conveniently forgotten. Remembering raupo houses in colonial New Zealand contributes to recent scholarship theorising the existence of a ‘middle ground’ in the colony, at least until 1840 and potentially up to the 1860s.
This paper explores the transformative power of digital humanities in teaching family history online to large cohorts of Australian domestic students. It takes as a case study a unit developed specifically for students to learn about how to research their convict ancestors’ lives and how to situate their ancestors’ lived experiences within relevant wider contexts. Its focus is twofold. The convergence of rapidly expanding digital repositories and databases of family history-related information and increasingly sophisticated online teaching platforms and how this has facilitated a shift from face-to-face to fully online learning and teaching is examined. The ways in which this transformative change was engineered through the unit design, delivery, and evaluative processes are then canvassed. The case study demonstrates how, with thoughtful, well-structured, and innovative approaches to design and by adopting a bespoke delivery model for online delivery, students can readily learn to access and engage critically with extensive online resources and can be equipped with the digital tools to use these optimally and to their satisfaction.
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