Alternate learning/ teaching/ delivery models

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ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION. Summer / Été 2013 1. Living documents. Pros. Many previous examples. Creativity
The Future of Engineering and Technology Education

Alternate learning / teaching / delivery models Student sentiments Chris Pikula WHEN I THINK ABOUT living documents, the first thing that comes to mind would be the knowledge database that I worked with for my summer job. There were many different articles: from bug reports and solutions to customer relationship tutorials and crisis management techniques. The ability to call upon such a resource was both good and difficult. Good, in that most information that I required was available, but difficult in that it represented a fairly well aged style of information storage that I was not used to in the slightest. So when I first thought about bringing this into an educational setting, I thought, ‘Yes, we need that!” The ability to have a long term storage of information that could evolve and be used for years and years would be

Living documen

ts

Pros ✔Many previo us examples ✔Creativity is encouraged ✔Allow spec ialized and valuab le work Cons ✘ Cheating ✘ Too much info rmation ✘ Hard to Evalua student - teacher te with low ratios ✘ Hard to prevent ‘sla cking’ ✘ Hard to present ✘ Need to have a ‘c hangeo

wonderful. It would be a great experience for people to learn how to come into an organization and to adapt themselves to it, rather than having to build their own system for the nth time. With all ideas that are great, there immediately comes the next thought stage: If it’s so great, why isn’t it used? Well, there’s a few issues with it. We’ve got the need to have a long-term medium. There needs to be the ability for it not to grow too complex, for it to still be functionally useable for people who will only experience it for a short period of time. It needs to be able to be implemented. Lastly, and most difficultly, it needs to be created with great foresight, as the style that it is created in will be the style that it will keep. These are difficulties, so let us look at each one in turn. A long-term medium is an interesting thing. Twenty years ago, books and filing cabinets were the way it was done. Today we look at databases and wikis. In 20 years from now, it’s hard to predict. Thankfully the age of computers has made such things easier. Still, keeping a portable knowledge base will be critical to the continued success of the idea. With a long term goal outlined ahead of time, this Twenty years would be much easier to deal with, and problems with a lack of support, ago, books and information loss, etc, would become filing cabinets much easier to manage.

were the way it was done. Today we look at databases and wikis.

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About the Author Chris Pikula is an undergraduate student at the University of Regina in the Electronic Systems Engineering program, and helps run the IEEE Student Branch. A native of Saskatchewan, he enjoys cycling and reading. His current interests are focused towards EM simulation.

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Complexity is a difficult thing to measure, especially about what we ourselves create. Working through stages, building our magnus opus, creating a detailed analysis of a finished product, all of these things are more complex to outsiders than to those who create them. It can be intimidating to new users of such information, and thus careful measures need to be in place that topics have ways to be approached. It is utterly expected that eventually such a document would grow in scope such that no one person had a solid grasp of the contents. Trimming or forking of such documents would be expected in time, and would likely provide an interesting upgrade path for technology revisions. How useful is an empty document? How useful is it to start such a thing? These were just a couple of the questions that I was asked when I talked about such a thing at my university. The first few sets of students that

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The Future of Engineering and Technology Education O P I N I O N

O P I N I O N

by Doug Houseman

by David G. Michelson

THE KEY TO NEXT generation education includes a complete environment, use of real tools and real problems to be solved. This means not only material from prior classes and students but a strong input of industry issues and problems along with the solution sets for each. Moving away from canned problem sets to real world problems not only helps accelerate the learning but prepares students for tackling problems in the real world. It also helps keep them interested - because these are not academic issues, but rather the real situations that they will walk into in the real world. implement a living document have a much different experience than the following ones. Incorporating such an adjustment into a education program tends to create headaches, as institutions need to be able to teach certain skills, and a class that continually adjusts is hard to adapt a program to. The largest difficulty comes in that to teach such a class an educator needs to continually adapt far more than for a class that could be taught in similar ways for several years. This requires more time and effort than a normal class, so it would need to be seen that this practice can be valuable, and well worth the additional time. A bit of a chicken and an egg problem. When looking at these issues, what comes up again and again is that there would be a great deal that would need to be planned out ahead of time. However once it is in place, then things should just work, in theory. This is a rationalization that I have seen repeatedly. Many work-hours are spent rolling up a system and implementing it, but very rarely is there work done to help set up a self-organizing, clear and implementable style. This could be anything, from making sure that in your wiki that articles are never more than five pages long, to having standards for information revision and deletion. The creation of styles is usually put off, as it can be difficult to know what you need before you have information, but once your living document has such a style, it can be very difficult to alter it. To pull an example from programming, I’ve seen two coders work on a project, each who had specific ideas on how to name their variables. When the time came to join their work, they each wanted the other to conform to their style, as to not need to redo much of their work. Imagine needing to redo several years worth of work from a living document! So it’s utterly important that a plan is made ahead of time, or else the long term prospects of the document would be a tangled knot. So we can see that there are challenges with creating such knowledge archives. Some might say that this means that we shouldn’t, but that’s not the correct attitude to take. Every successful company implements similar works, so why shouldn’t students be exposed to them, to get used to adapting to them, to gain the ability of how to contribute to something that will be worked on long after they are done. Living documents could be the students first encounter with a work-force knowledge base. One of the first, and best outcomes of a implemented living document would be that it would allow for students to learn in separate ways. A good deal of time is spent in classes trying to teach students the same material over and over. This is unavoidable, as people learn in several different ways, and can have great difficulty learning in a way that isn’t what they are suited for. A way of having a multitude of previous work 2

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EVERY STUDENT ENTERS a degree program or an engineering course with his or her own unique set of experiences, expectations and abilities. No single mode of delivery will satisfy every student. Group application exercises and exposure to industry practice are extremely motivating but their impact is diminished if the students are lacking in the fundamental knowledge and problem solving skills that are associated with the subject matter. Student time is limited so efficiency must be considered when selecting the mechanisms for imparting fundamental knowledge and problem solving skills. The nature of the material must also be assessed. In some disciplines, reading assignments are sufficient to impart the basic knowledge required. In engineering, the students themselves are requesting that adequate lecture time be allocated to rapidly and efficiently explain concepts and share problem solving strategies. When this is followed up with group application exercises and exposure to industry practice, success is inevitable.

David G. Michelson is with the University of British Columbia, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Vancouver.

would be that the separate learning styles could be seen and the new student could find the methods that work best for them. As a student we see a great deal of concern and issue around the problems of cheating and academic conduct. The first, and largest concern is that Engineering is taught in many different ways by many different people. This diversity is important, as without it, we would all find similar solutions to problems. Certain problems have specific solutions, but the methods of implementation vary everywhere. The ability for a student to have a small section that they need to become an expert in, for them to keep pace and connected with other contributors and to help deliver a large finalized revision would be a better example of work-force experience than anything I’ve ever experienced in my time as a student. This makes the transition from student to professional easier, and would make the student more competitive when it came to future opportunities. An interesting use of a generational course like this would be to have it taught not once, but twice to students. The largest use would be in having the students who took the course previously become the leaders, where the new students would be brought into the organizational structure. This would provide an enormous positive impact to the students, as the ability to communicate information and to experience both sides of the workermanagement schizm would provide an experience that could not be gained in any other fashion. It would be interesting to have such a class become required, one where a work environment was the norm, and skills weren’t taught and regurgitated, but where the skills were acquired through the need to implement and incorporate solutions. It’s the reason we are all working anyways, right? n S L FOCU

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION