Personalized Engineering Education for the Twenty-First Century
6.5 Closing Comments
workplace are the competencies to fi rst identify and then to manage dilemmas (see Ahmed et al., 2012 ; Bertus et al., 2012 ). The instructors found that instead of completely free-form collaboration between students across different universities, it is better to scaffold the team formation using principles from the learning orga- nization. By letting the students defi ne their own learning goals fi rst, and then abstracting group level goals, the students are able to relate what they want to achieve with what other students in the group want to achieve. This ensures that the students are motivated to achieve the group objectives while making progress towards their individual goals. This also helps in task allocation. The use of Bloom’s taxonomy for formulating learning objectives is found to be particularly effective rather than letting the students defi ne objectives in free form. Based on the instructors’ experience, if the students are not given any structure for learning objectives, they tend to formulate objectives that are task oriented, as opposed to learning oriented.
Although this approach has many advantages over traditional courses, instruc- tors should be aware that most students are unfamiliar with such a pedagogical approach. Most students are used to traditional content-focused courses where the lectures are meant to deliver technical information. Focusing more on the process can be a diffi cult challenge. There is potential for some students, particularly those who have just started a graduate program, to get discouraged when they fi nd the instructors posing higher-level questions such as a question for the semester, rather than providing specifi c answers directly. Hence, instructors need to provide con- tinuous encouragement to the students to think differently. It is important for instructors to repeatedly emphasize the importance of the process, in addition to the technical content.
Based on the instructors’ experience, one of the most diffi cult tasks is self- grading. Most of the students who take the class are used to following evaluation schemes provided by their instructors. However, in this class students are asked to develop their own evaluation rubrics based on their personal learning objectives and competencies.
There were a number of recurring themes in the students’ feedback. For exam- ple, by taking the course, the students became conscious of the process of learning and realized the importance of setting learning objectives. The students learned the value of being able to see the broader view of globalization and the importance of being able to speculate the future. They also gained the understanding that complex systems do not have optimum solutions, but are often associated with dilemmas that need to be managed. The students realized the importance of being able to identify and fi lter information from diverse sources that are currently available on the Internet and gained some experience with it. Finally, the students were able to iden- tify challenges associated with collaboration among individuals with different goals especially when collaboration was across multiple sites.
Engineering students in the twenty-fi rst century should be able to receive degrees that are tailored to their personal needs and the professional career path they wish to pursue, whether it is in industry, entrepreneurship, or academia. This necessitates the adoption of both the appropriate technology and a game-changing
pedagogy—one that embodies competency-based engineering education anchored in the mass customization of the engineering curriculum!
Acknowledgements Janet K. Allen and Farrokh Mistree are a husband and wife team that have developed and team taught several courses together since 1976. Their work is foundational to what is presented in this chapter. The work presented in this chapter is rooted in ME6102 Designing Open Engineering Systems fi rst offered at Georgia Tech in the Winter Quarter of 1993 by Farrokh Mistree. Both Jitesh Panchal and Zahed Siddique were graduate students who took this course and have contributed to its evolution as colleagues in academia. Dirk Schaefer and Jitesh Panchal team taught this course with Farrokh Mistree at Georgia Tech. In 2009, when Farrokh Mistree moved to the University of Oklahoma, the course morphed to AME 5740 Designing for Open Innovation . Jitesh Panchal and Sammy Haroon have been involved in the offering of both ME6102 and AME5740. Sammy’s most notable contribution is the notion of managing dilemmas which now is a foundational construct of both ME6102 and AME5740.
Over the years engineers at several companies have been involved, for example, Procter &
Gamble, HP, and MSC Software. Clearly, we have learned from our students. We thank them all.
Farrokh Mistree gratefully acknowledges funding from the L.A. Comp Chair of Engineering and Janet K. Allen gratefully acknowledges funding from the John and Mary Moore Chair of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma.
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113 M. Gosper and D. Ifenthaler (eds.), Curriculum Models for the 21st Century:
Using Learning Technologies in Higher Education, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7366-4_7,
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract Curricula of the twenty fi rst century promote the development of critical skills, content knowledge, expertise, and literacies for the twenty-one-century learner. Creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collabo- ration, initiative and self-direction, social and cross-cultural skills, and leadership and responsibility are among the most critical elements a contemporary curriculum should embrace. This chapter provides insights on how to create and sustain an enterprise-based curriculum as an alternative curricular model for educating the twenty-one-century instructional designer. Alternative teaching approaches to instructional design and the experiential learning framework are discussed, as well as the rise of entrepreneurism in education. The chapter concludes with a compre- hensive discussion of a case of an enterprise-based curriculum implementation that resulted in the creation of a self-sustaining instructional design consulting organization.
Keywords Instructional design • Entrepreneurism • Experiential learning