Nihad Subasic teaches Electrical Engineering and Mechatronics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. In 2021 started new research on online education of Engineering studies and Möbius.
In this three-part blog series, Nihad shares his experience on how he designs effective, interactive courses using Möbius.
What was your experience in teaching Electrical Engineering courses like before Möbius?
Before Möbius, we had traditional lessons with one-way communication — preaching in practice. We tried different methods to get students involved in dialogue and problem-solving tasks but without any noticeable results. Instead, students were passive consumers of the knowledge we imparted. Now with Möbius in the classroom, students have to prove they understand what we are teaching them when they go online to complete their assignments.
How did you start using Möbius and how is it helping you?
We teachers who work at the Division of Mechatronics have a tradition of collaborating and discussing different course solutions. We’ve tried several other educational software tools to help teach our students. When my colleague Hans Johansson showed us the Möbius platform, I was immediately excited to use it. As an old programmer, I saw an online software platform constructed in a modern way. It was clear that Möbius had the technical ability to meet the requirements for our engineering courses.
Möbius, for me, is like an extra assistant in the classroom, whether I’m teaching on campus or teaching virtually through Canvas.
My students like Möbius activities, and I often get inspiration to develop new activities from my students’ questions. We also have a database with old exam activities that we have digitized and made interactive for student practising purposes. We use questions with feedback and hints and then ask similar questions in an examination setting to assess if our students understand the concepts we teach.
Möbius integrates well with Canvas, and so it offers flexibility for my students. My students appreciate that they can watch videos from different universities and practice tasks as often as possible.
They can watch the lessons, answer questions based on what they learned, and get feedback similar to what an assistant or I would provide but get this feedback immediately when it benefits them the most.
The student’s advantage is that they can do this when they feel ready, as they can submit mandatory assignments when it suits them.
This is part 1 of the Designing Effective STEM Course Blog Series. Continue to Part 2.