Biomedical Engineering undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison participate in six semesters of engineering design. In addition to engineering design aptitude, successful designers require proficiency in an auxiliary set of skills related to the design process. We have created professional development training materials on topics associated with auxiliary design skills for students within this design course series. Topics include working in teams, interacting with clients, presentation skills, design ethics and regulations, and global design. The training materials consist of an online video archive of experts speaking on such topics and associated active learning exercises. Using online, pre-recorded expert lectures makes class time available for conducting the active learning exercises, including working on design projects.
The training content is modular, allowing small or large portions to be incorporated in a range of design courses. The impact on student learning related to these topics was evaluated during the 20082009 academic year through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Introduction and Background In 2005, a new course for undergraduates, “Introduction to Engineering Research,” was created as the first one-credit course in a research sequence at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UW). Subsequently, supplemental materials were created to enhance this course and make these resources widely available to other faculty and programs with similar goals for undergraduate students.
These supplemental materials were then refined into a collection of learning objects, taking the form of short presentations by experts (videos/audio/slides), readings, and in-class active learning activities. Currently, the collection consists of twenty-five video presentations with an average video/audio length of 14 minutes, twenty-four associated readings, and fourteen lesson plans that have been incorporated into the “Introduction to Engineering Research” course and an optional evening seminar series. 1 Evaluation of these offerings suggested that undergraduate students found them to be interesting, informative, and useful towards their development as researchers. 2 One of the key objectives in the initial effort was to provide opportunities for active learning with the use of the learning objects that enhance student engagement in a classroom or seminar environment which might otherwise rely upon lecture alone. 3-4 Given that there are a number of additional topics that are critical for the practice of engineering design we embarked on a collaboration to develop a similar set of modular, on-demand learning objects focused on auxiliary skills needed in engineering design in general and biomedical engineering design in particular. We selected the UW Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department as a test case for our approach because of the rich design “backbone” that is at the center of its curriculum. Students in the UW BME program are required to complete a sixsemester design course series, such that they take a design course every semester they are in the program (sophomore through senior years). 5,6 Students work in 4-person teams and each team works on a different project. All the projects are client-based, real-world design problems, P ge 14460.2 solicited from the medical and life sciences faculty around the university and from biomedical engineering companies. Each design team meets weekly with each other and their advisor in class; teams also meet frequently with their client outside of class. Despite the heavy time and workload demands of these design courses, all but one are 1-credit only.
Thus, time is at a premium for design students and in-class time when team members can meet face-to-face and engage in active learning is especially valuable. Balancing the need to instruct new design students and provide in-class time for teamwork is a significant challenge for UW BME design faculty. Typically, up to 20 minutes of in-class time every other week is spent educating first semester students about the basics of design: the design process, keeping a design notebook, writing a progress report, teamwork and leadership, fundamentals of oral and poster presentations, etc. In addition, outside experts are frequently brought in to discuss auxiliary topics that may be relevant to the students’ design projects, such as designing human and animal experiments, protection of intellectual property, engineering ethics, or global engineering design. However, students’ enthusiasm for and interest in lecture topics that are not of immediate importance is low. Additionally, there is resistance from both students and faculty to substantially increase the assignments, or “deliverables”, due each semester that do not directly pertain to their design. Therefore, the principal goal of this current work was to deliver information pertinent to auxiliary design skills online, outside of class, thus making additional class time available for student teams to engage in active learning and work together on their specific design project. Building on the research-oriented collection of learning objects, the primary learning objects developed here are a collection of videos and short in-class activities focused on design-related topics. Students were encouraged to view the videos on their own time; only one new deliverable was introduced as an out-of-class activity. Table 1 lists the topics that were developed, which are available online at www.mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/research/. Since UW BME design students take six semesters of design, not all topics are presented each semester. Furthermore, not all of the topics in Table 1 are pertinent to all BME design students in any given semester. For example, a team may work on a project that deals with animal experiments in one semester (see topic: Animal Welfare) but human subjects (see topics: Institutional Review Boards and Human Factors and Ergonomics) another semester. Topics for which new learning objects were introduced in the Fall 2008 semester were Working With Clients, Progress Reports, Oral Presentations, Poster Presentations, and Global Engineering. The first four topics consisted of online video lectures with accompanying slide presentations. Each of these topics addressed activities and deliverables already incorporated into the ongoing course; thus additional activities were not developed. For instance, the videos and slides for Oral Presentations and Poster Presentations were assigned to students before their own poster and slide presentations were due. Additionally, the videos on Working with Clients and Progress Reports were provided to students as a resource to improve upon their regular interactions with clients and advisors. Global Engineering is one of those topics which are not presented every semester. Because most students did not specifically address issues related to Global Engineering within their current design project, a reflective essay based on the video content was added as a required assignment for all students. This assignment was designed to further encourage viewing Page 14460.3 of the video and assess understanding of the concepts it presented. The assignment is provided in Appendix I. New topics for which learning objects were introduced in Spring 2009 included Human Factors and Ergonomics and Design Ethics. For the topic of Human Factors and Ergonomics, students were encouraged to watch a video on the topic and/or view narrated slides produced by a BME faculty member. An optional evening workshop was later offered for students whose current design project required the topic.
