Technology-Enabled Learningin

Engineering Education

Dr. Jeffrey E. Froyd

Department of Electrical Engineering

Texas A&M University

Curriculum-wide, college-wide, and perhaps university-wide action is required to take advantage of the opportunities and meet the challenges offered by increasingly capable technology with respect to improving engineering education.

5 – Strongly Agree

4 – Agree

3 – Neutral

2 – Disagree

1 – Strongly Disagree

Mark your answers on a piece of paper and submit.

Overall Workshop Objective

Participants will give significantly stronger assent to the following

statement:

Curriculum-wide, college-wide, and perhaps university-wide action is required to take advantage of the opportunities and meet the challenges offered by increasingly capable technology with respect to improving engineering education.

Workshop Ground Rules

• Workshop is a PARTNERSHIP– Both facilitator and participants are mutually accountable

for the outcomes of the workshop.

• Ask questions at ANY TIME– Facilitator may place the question in an issue bin, but the

question will be addressed during the workshop.

• Participants must DISCOVER the directions in which action will be taken– I don’t know the answers to all the questions, and even if

I did (which I don’t), participants would not be sufficiently engaged to act upon the answers.

Learning and Teaching

Learning Theories

How do people learn?

• Neurological

• Cognitive

• Content-Specific

• Classroom

Pedagogical Theories

How do you facilitate learning?

• Active learning

• Cooperative learning

• Contextual learning

• Technology-enabled learning

Expectations

What do you want people to learn?

Syllabi/Objectives/Outcomes/Taxonomy

Categories of Technology

• Learner-Centered: Focus on what students are doing with technology

• Stop here and ask participants for suggestions on what students can do with technology.

• Are they receiving/consuming information?

• Are they communicating/collaborating with other students? With the teacher?

• Are they learning to use new tools for designing and/or analyzing engineering artifacts?

Forming Teams

• Reorganize yourselves into teams of 4 people• Teams composition should emphasize diversity

among disciplines• Introduce yourself to your teammates

– Name– Department– What do you want to take away from the workshop?– What do you want to contribute to the workshop?

• Be prepared to share the answers from your teammates

Categories of Technology• Consumptive Technology

– Facilitates access to and transfer of information– Faculty generate info; students read info– Examples: browsers, Adobe Acrobat Reader

• Collaborative Technology– Facilitates communication among class members– Examples: e-mail, web forums (WebBoard)

• Generative Technology– Facilitates increasingly powerful actions by users– Students can perform more difficult tasks with the same

effort or the same tasks with less effort– Examples: MATLAB, Maple, Microsoft Office

Team Discussion

• Describe ways in which the preceding breakdown of technologies helps you create ways to apply technology to engineering education.

• Describe ways in which the preceding breakdown of technologies makes it more difficult for you to create ways to apply technology to engineering education

Team Discussion Results

Helps• First remark

Hinders• First remark

Consumptive TechnologyExamples

• Hypertext Browsers

• Adobe Acrobat Reader

• Multimedia Players– Real Player– Microsoft Media Player

• Java Applets

• Computer-Graded Assignments (?)

Consumptive TechnologyCharacteristics

• Student perspective: Technology is easy to learn and use.

• Faculty perspective: Technology presents a substantial learning curve and choices among technologies are difficult to make.

• Faculty perspective: It takes a SUBSTANTIAL amount of time to create material for student consumption. For multi-media materials the ratio of creation time to viewing time may be higher than 10:1.

• Faculty perspective: Reuse of material is very important.

Consumptive Technology

• Woody Flowers presentation– http://www.asme.org/educate/

• Burks Oakley presentations– http://www.online.uillinois.edu/oakley/

• Kurt Gramoll projects (Engineering Media Lab)– http://eml.ou.edu/

• NEEDS (National Engineering Education Delivery System)

– http://www.needs.org

• SCALE (Sloan Center for Asynchronous Learning Environments)

– http://w3.scale.uiuc.edu/scale/

Team Discussion

• Describe at least four different applications of consumptive technology in the undergraduate engineering curriculum at UA.

• For each application describe at least three ways in which student learning could be improved.

• For each application describe at least three barriers to successful implementation.

Team Discussion Results

Collaborative TechnologyExamples

• E-mail• Web Forums – threaded discussions

– WebBoard– First Class

• Instant Messaging– AOL IM– ICQ

• Conferencing Software– Microsoft NetMeeting

Consumptive TechnologyCharacteristics

• Student perspective: Technology is easy to learn and use.

• Faculty perspective: Technology presents a substantial learning curve and choices among technologies are difficult to make.

• Faculty perspective: It takes a SUBSTANTIAL amount of time to create material for student consumption. For multi-media materials the ratio of creation time to viewing time may be higher than 10:1.

• Faculty perspective: Reuse of material is very important.

Communicative Technology

• Math Forum– http://www.mathforum.com/

Generative TechnologyExamples

• Programming Languages

• Office Productivity Suites

• Numeric Manipulation Systems

• Symbolic Manipulation Systems

• Computer-Aided Design Packages

Generative Technology

• Generative technologies have steeper and longer learning curves for both students and faculty than consumptive and collaborative technologies.

• If students and faculty go to the effort to learn a generative technology, it seems that it would be more helpful to build on that learning in one or more subsequent classes.

Team Discussion

• Describe at least four applications of each of the following types of technologies in the undergraduate curriculum at UA.– Consumptive Technology

– Communicative Technology

– Generative Technology

Generative TechnologyProgramming Languages

• System Languages– FORTRAN– C– C++

• Scripting Languages– Perl– Python– TCL– Rebol

Generative TechnologyOffice Productivity Suites

• Microsoft Office– Word

– Excel

– PowerPoint

– Outlook – e-mail

– Access - database

Generative TechnologyNumeric Manipulation Systems

• MATLAB– Simulink

– Toolboxes: Signal Processing, Control, etc.

• Octave– Open Source Project

Generative TechnologySymbolic Manipulation Systems

• Maple

• Mathematica

• MathCAD

Generative TechnologyComputer-Aided Design Systems

• Electrical– Mentor Graphics, Cadence, Spice

• Mechanical / Thermal / Fluid– Working Model, Interactive Physics

– SDRC IDEAS

– AutoCAD, Mechanical Desktop

Generative TechnologyLaboratory Systems

• Examples– LabVIEW

– VEE

• Computer-Based Instrumentation

• Laboratory Automation

Generative TechnologiesFamiliarity

• Symbolic Manipulation Systems?

• Numerical Manipulation Systems?

• Computer-Aided Design Packages?

• Laboratory Systems

Generative Technologies

• Learn from our experiences in teaching programming to languages– Sometimes difficult to motivate, sometimes

associated with the knowledge of students that they would not use programming in subsequent courses

– Confusion on which language(s) to teach, primarily because different professors wanted to use different languages in following courses

– Engineering professors, by the nature of their learning experiences, don’t arrive equipped to teach programming