The Charles Sturt University (CSU) Engineering programme is a new course (degree programmme) established in 2016 by a university that had not previously taught engineering. This start from scratch occasion was taken as an opportunity to build an all-new programme structure and philosophy. Students at CSU Engineering complete a sequence of three semester-long Project-Based Learning (PBL) style challenges across their time face-to-face at the university; after this point, they commence four yearlong paid industry-based work placements and continue studies in an online mode during evenings, weekends, and scheduled study days. The underlying technical curriculum for the engineering programme at Charles Sturt University is delivered mostly on-line via the RealizeIT platform and is based on a philosophy of just-in-time, self-directed learning. Students have freedom in deciding when, how and, to a large extent, which elements of the curriculum they engage within the online environment. This freedom, along with the PBL-style challenges, is enabled by the structure of the technical curriculum which is broken down into fine-grained learning activities called ‘topics’. In this paper, we summarise our experiences during the first four years, and the insights gained into student behaviours when offered an opportunity to engage in self-directed learning

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Charles Sturt University makes its underpinning technical curriculum available to its students using an on-demand online system they call their Topic Tree. The tree is a directed acyclic graph where nodes represent topics to be learned, and edges represent the prerequisite relationships that exist between the topics. Branches on the topic tree represent concentrations in an area of knowledge, sub-branches (water quality, fluid mechanics, etc.) represent distinct subsets of knowledge - specialty. Delivery of the technical content is in three-hour modules, and students are free to choose the order in which they engage with these topics.
Previous work has identified that students engage with the on-demand curriculum much as they engage with on-demand entertainment platforms such as Netflix, completing long sequences of topics with short periods between them – the traditional “binge” model of consumption.
This paper presents a more fine-grained analysis of students’ pathways through the topic tree, focusing on the distance between successive topics completed by the students. Students’ progress is characterized by a three-dimensional framework – time, distance, and purpose.
In general, pathways through the tree fall into one of four patterns:
- Forward movement along a branch of the tree,
- Movement backward along a branch of the tree,
- Repeating the same topic,
- Switching to a different branch of the tree (backward distance to the junction of the branches combined with a forward distance along the new branch)
Different students engage with the topic tree using different combinations of these pathways, distance absolute distance traveled through the topics, and different time gaps between activities on the topics. This paper will identify the different combinations that can be found in the student log data.
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