Teaching presentation skills in first year engineering curriculum using active video watching and personalised nudges

Presentation skills, as well as other transferrable/professional skills, are deemed essential for employability, but are difficult to teach in a classroom situation. Transferable skills need to be taught with minimal demands on teachers, and at scale. We present such an approach, which provides support for engagement during active video watching. In previous work, we developed AVW-Space, a Web-based platform for active video watching, which supported interactive note taking using reflective micro-scaffolds. The results from the first study allowed us to add additional support for engagement, in the form of interactive visualisations and personalised nudges. In this paper, we present the results of a study conducted in a large first-year engineering course, in which we compared the learning effectiveness of the two versions of AVW-Space. The results show that only students who actively engaged with videos improved their conceptual knowledge of presentation skills significantly. Furthermore, the enhancements were effective in fostering active learning.