Over the past six years, we've been working closely with a number of instructors and institutions in Ireland, listening to their needs and challenges and helping them embed technology into their course structure as part of the solution.

Through this work we've been able to build up a good picture of just how technology can yield tangible results in improving student outcomes and reducing instructor workload, and we've been able to share it with more and more instructors, leading to something of a snowball effect in Ireland. Now we'd like to share it more widely so that other instructors across our region might benefit too.

Motivation and Engagement: Strategies to Success (White Paper)

In a perfect world, all students would come to Higher Education imbued with searing determination, a devotion to their subject and an almost blinkered academic focus. Unfortunately, we know that the reality is very different, with most students’ time and attention pulled in different directions by other interests and responsibilities. While extremely natural, this can result in suboptimal learning practices that can ultimately affect final grade and retention of learning. So, what can be done to help students learn more effectively and consistently?

Donal Palcic

University of Limerick, Microeconomics

Discover how Donal has used to Connect to get students reading again with SmartBook, and how he uses the structure of the platfrom to provide students with a supportive framework to ease them into third-level study and set them up with good study habits. 

Alejandra Ramos

Trinity College Dublin, Statistics

Teaching a statistics course to a wide range of students with varying degrees of comfort with and interest in statistics, Alejandra has used Connect to set up a flipped classroom approach that her students love - doing the pre-reading online and using face to face classtime to focus on topics or concepts students found difficult, and work through problem sets in groups, minimising duplication and maximising learning. 

Linda Stewart

Queen's College Belfast, Microbiology

For Linda, it's the transparency that Connect provides that's one of the biggest advantages, allowing her to monitor students' progress - while the virtual labs are also perfect for remote learning both during the pandemic and in the new hybrid era. She describes the support she received from McGraw Hill with set-up as 'second to none'.

Paul van Kampen

Dublin City University, Physics

Paul was looking for resources that would be more cost-effective for his students than a printed textbook, and decided to evaluate Connect as it was already being used by other colleagues. He has now built pre-readings and assessments in Connect  (including the final exam) into the course structure, and finds that students are now performing better in the end-of-module assessments because they have had an opportunity to familiarise themselves with the format.

Vanessa Egan

University of Limerick, Management Accounting

Vanessa is particularly happy with the test bank in Connect that allows her to carry out continuous assessment and saves her a lot of time and energy in creating her own assessment items - with the added benefit of algorithmic questions and the elimination of human error in marking.

Watch the webinar

An offshoot of the white paper, Alejandra Ramos and Donal Palcic join us for a webinar session discussing in more depth how they are using Connect, among other tools and methods, to increase student motivation and engagement on their courses.  

Find out more about the Connect platform - what you get, and how the learning science that went into its creation yields tangible results.