Our diverse team of educators at Colorado State University are redefining what it means to teach and learn in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Read a detailed description of our work in IEEE Access. 

Pillars of our new approach to learning:

Knowledge Integration Activities

To help students understand why they are learning material and how it will help them engineer a better world, every four weeks we are bringing together all the professors and students from the technical core of the junior year to participate in hands-on group exercises called knowledge integration (KI) activities.

Learning Studio Modules  

Moving away from the “siloed” course structure, a multifaceted faculty team rearranged and synthesized core courses from the sophomore and junior years into Learning Studio Modules (LSMs). Unlike typical courses, LSMs blur the lines between courses and provide a framework for delivering content at a fine-grained level. As a result of the faculty team collaborations, each LSM is taught using common terminology, notations, and shared examples so that students can see how the material connects across the curriculum. The fine granularity of the concepts in LSMs allows synchronization of required concepts across the curriculum to better serve the knowledge integration (KI) activities.

• 2nd year curriculum
  
• 3rd year curriculum

Threads throughout the Curriculum

Many central concepts and skills impact a student’s ability to become a well-rounded engineer. Rather than teaching these important themes in isolation, we are weaving them throughout the curriculum:

• Creativity Thread
• Foundations Thread
• Professionalism Thread 

Through a multifaceted educational and organizational change research plan, we studied the effectiveness of our new approach to teaching and learning.

Our research shows there has been a positive, quantifiable change to the performance of ECE students as a result of the RED grant. We performed a quantitative analysis of assessments of students pre- and post-intervention using data spanning 20 years. Details are outlined in our paper, “Non-parametric Analysis of the Effect of Knowledge Integration Activities on Third-year Undergraduate Performance,” in IEEE Transactions on Education.