The Internet and the Classroom

It’s up to educators to make sure instant access to knowledge complements teaching.

By Debbie Chachra

The organization of universities, courses, and learning experiences has largely been shaped by a world in which access to information is difficult. I’m writing this in Cambridge, England, where the university traces its founding to a group of students who migrated from Oxford in 1209. Since then, it’s been a community of scholars and documents—concentrating knowledge through the spoken word and on paper. For most of this time, in order to access this fount of information effectively, you had to be at the university itself.

The college where I teach, near Cambridge, Massachusetts, is newer than wine served at some University of Cambridge college dinners. Founded in 1997, it is part of a global network of scholars that was facilitated first by the printing press, then by worldwide postal services, and now by the next great revolution in access to information.

Five hundred years ago, access to knowledge meant joining one of a very few communities of scholars. Fifty years ago, it meant physically going to a local library. But as of about five years ago, it has meant pulling knowledge out of the air, wherever you might be–not everywhere, not universally, but it’s hard to imagine that access to information will ever become more difficult than it is right now.

The physical layout of the traditional lecture hall, in which all the chairs face a single individual at the front of the room, encodes a pedagogy that is predicated on that faculty member being the sole source of expertise accessible from within the classroom. But the Internet and wireless technology give us the option of dismantling educational structures—physical and otherwise—that were necessary when access to information was difficult.

The shared physical setting of a college continues to be valuable for today’s students and scholars. For them, as it was for those 13th-century youths who gathered in Cambridge, it’s also about being part of a community of learners. But educators need to ask what it means to be inside a classroom where the walls are no longer a barrier to the flow of information.

Some electronic education technology amounts to “using bright new gadgets to teach the same old stuff in thinly disguised versions of the same old way,” in Seymour Papert’s prophetic words from 1971. So what are new ways of learning that better use the resources that electronic technology make available to us?

In his October 2015 Learning Devices column in Prism, Chris Rogers provided some excellent practical tips on using a smartphone in the classroom, ranging from its simple use as a calculator to sophisticated sensing, image processing, and control. As he put it, “My goal is always to turn the classroom into a space where students find different solutions to the same problems, and thereby teach each other–and me.” But we can extend out from this. In general, I don’t want my students to find different solutions to the same problems. I want them all to work on different problems—project-based learning is entirely facilitated by students being able to research their topic, on their own, from within the classroom or the lab, since I no longer need to carefully confine what they learn to the limits of my knowledge. I teach introductory materials science, which is an enormously broad field, and my students have taken on projects on everything from Widmanstätten patterns in meteorites to quantum dots. But as Rogers suggests, this also means that the students become sources of knowledge for each other and for me.

More broadly, we can stop thinking of ourselves as just the locally resident source of knowledge, and help our students learn how to find, synthesize, evaluate, and use information online. My engineering exams often had one-page “cheat sheets” to free students from having to memorize equations. Now that everyone has access to a universal cheat sheet, how does it change what and how we teach?

I was the kind of kid who read encyclopedias and who lived in the library, and I’m delighted that a generation of students is growing up in a world where there are no longer walls around knowledge. It’s up to us, as educators, to help them make the most of it.

Debbie Chachra is an associate professor of materials science at Olin College.

Assessing Entrepreneurship

It’s too complex for a single measure.

By Senay Purzer, Nicholas D. Fila and Kavin Nataraja

Let’s say you’re planning an entrepreneurship initiative in your institution. Perhaps you’re introducing a new entrepreneurship course for engineering students, or a certificate program, minor, or major. Perhaps you’re looking to incorporate entrepreneurial content in your thermodynamics course. How will you know whether your initiative has been successful? As with many educational innovations, one of the primary challenges educators face is finding assessment instruments and methods to provide fair and valid inferences of student learning and programmatic success.

We conducted a comprehensive literature search to explore the existing methods used to assess engineering entrepreneurship. We found a total of 52 relevant assessment instruments, including seven distinct assessment types (surveys, project deliverables, essays, quizzes, interviews, concept map exercises, and observations of student behavior) and eight distinct assessment topics (business planning, design, communication, business realization, teamwork, leadership, professional practice, and general conceptions of entrepreneurship). The variety in these instruments reveals that engineering entrepreneurship is not viewed as a unified construct, but composed of diverse knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Hence, a single instrument would not be sufficient to demonstrate success, but a system of instruments is needed to capture the complexity of engineering entrepreneurship.

For classroom assessment, the keys are to plan assessment activities along with learning activities and to assess student progress on specific competencies rather than specific deliverables. First, start with a list of competencies you want students to develop by the end of the course. The topics discussed earlier (e.g., business realization) may provide some guidance. Next, create a matrix that aligns competencies with evidence pieces (deliverables students will complete, observations, tests, etc.), which make up opportunities for assessment. Through such mapping, you might see some competencies are under- or over-assessed throughout a semester. One important finding of our study was that assessment took a variety of forms; yet, there is also the need and opportunity for creativity in developing new ways of assessment.

Our study demonstrated that there are a variety of assessment instruments that engineering educators may be able to use for programmatic assessment purposes. However, the first consideration should be evaluating the appropriate use of these instruments, ideally with input from the developers of the instrument and insights from small-scale pilot studies. How confident are you that students will interpret items as intended? What are the appropriate uses of assessment results? Many of the assessments we found were not evaluated for fairness and validity for the contexts in which they were used. We suggest collecting your own validity evidence and collaborating with assessment experts on this process.

Assessment provides a means to track student progress and to evaluate the success of our educational initiatives. One key question moving forward is: What is unique about engineering entrepreneurship compared with conceptualizations in other fields, such as business? We must find new ways to assess the knowledge, skills, and attitudes across the topics that are important for engineers, and we must do so in ways that are appropriate, relevant, and meaningful for our students. With 52 assessments and counting, we have a good start.

Senay Purzer is an associate professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University, where Nicholas D. Fila is a doctoral candidate. Kavin M. Nataraja is a software developer at J.P. Morgan Chase. This article is excerpted from “Evaluation of Current Assessment Methods in Engineering Entrepreneurship Education” in the Winter 2016 issue of Advances in Engineering Education. (Supported by NSF Grant 1150874)

GRIPPING THE GAVEL

Louis Martin-Vega, engineering dean at North Carolina State University, assumed ASEE's presidency June 29 at the society’s annual conference. He succeeded Joseph Rencis, engineering dean at Tennessee Tech University, who will continue in a leadership role as immediate past president. Click here to watch an ASEE TV interview with the new president. See Michelle Bersabal's photos of other events and festivities in New Orleans by clicking on the Conference Connection blog.

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