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Supporting Collaborative Teams in Engineering Education
Supporting large scale, collaborative, lifelong learning on and off the campus
The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science alone is expecting a 50% increase in student
enrollment in coming years. In light of this increasing demand, we are investigating ways to increase the
effectiveness and productivity of our teaching staff without compromising the quality of education.
We are looking into providing tools for maintaining rich communication and high-levels of awareness between
student project group members and between students and the instructors. In addition, by instrumenting these
tools to track usage patterns and group work practices, we hope to be able to automatically analyze assessment
metrics such as work progress and content understanding.
To date, we have run two pilot sessions to evaluate our tools. Both sessions were run on Undergraduate Computer Science classes of approximately 50 students. Preliminary analyses of the data suggest that with higher participation rates from the students we may be able to identify groups who would benefit from additional attention from the instructor. Our plans for the next semester are to improve the participation rate of students with the software in order to obtain a richer, more complete dataset and to use this dataset to refine our metrics for identifying potential problems in groups.
High level goals:
- Lifelong Learning:
One proposal is to increase the availability and accessibility of our programs beyond that of a
traditional academic career. Not only could this distribute and reduce enrollment in high-volume
classes, it makes it possible for our graduates in industry to keep up with recent developments and
adapt to changing needs in the workplace.
- Distributed Learning:
Supporting lifelong learners requires adapting course delivery to busy working hours and remote
participants. At the same time, we can support learners in satellite campuses or their dorm rooms,
reducing the load on campus.
- Collaborative Learning
Pedagogies like group problem-based learning (PBL) emphasize group collaboration and self-guidance.
The role of the instructor is not reduced, but changed to that of mentor and tutor, requiring a
potentially different set of teaching tools.
Publications
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Li, F. C., Landay, J. A., and Joseph, A. D. "Supporting
Collaborative Teams in Engineering Education."
Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering
Education Annual Conference & Exposition, June 24-27,
2001, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
PDF (101K)
Li, F., Landay, J., Joseph, A. Distributed Electronic Collaborative Learning. Endeavor Retreat Summer 2000 Poster.
PowerPoint
Supporting Collaborative Teams in Engineering Education. Li, F. Masters Thesis.
PDF
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Contact Information
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