What learning activities and resources do the students prefer for their learning in a large first-year enrolment statistics service unit?

The first-year statistics service unit is offered to students studying towards a Bachelor of Science degree. Due to its large student cohort, introductory statistical unit assessments are designed as online mastery quizzes within a Learning Management System (a version of Moodle). Students are provided with pre-recorded lectures, Q&A lectures, and tutorials that could be taken online or on campus. Asynchronous discussion forums support opportunities for further questions and answers. Weekly practice quizzes are designed to help students to master weekly learning. They are created using R with a random seed so that students get a different version of the questions every time they attempt the quiz. The emphasis is on individualised learning and students’ progress through the material at their own pace over five modules. In this paper, we explore students’ engagement across discussion forums, online non-graded weekly practice quizzes, and the frequency of their access to the pre-recorded lectures. The relationship between students’ engagement in learning resources and activities and their learning outcomes will be presented and measured by their final marks for the unit. The results provide information for better unit design based on students’ engagement.