One Minute Engineer, Nth Generation: Expansion To A Small Private University

The concept of having first-year students conduct ‘One Minute Engineer’ (OME) presentations was presented at the 2006 ASEE National Conference 1 . OME presentations, first developed at Northeastern University (NU), consist of having students individually provide a short (nominally one minute) presentation on an engineering-related topic at the beginning of class each day, with each student participating once during the term. Students select the topics in advance on a firstcome, first-serve basis, with feedback from the instructor on the chosen topic. Instructors could then relate future lectures and concepts to earlier student presentations. The 2006 ASEE paper presented results from two instructors at two different universities. The data showed that students reported an increased awareness of engineering topics as a result of the One-Minute Engineer. Since this method showed similar and promising outcomes at two different institutions, the authors agreed to implement the OME activity across all sections of the first engineering course at Ohio Northern University (ONU). Preand postsurveys similar to those administered in the original OME implementation were used at this institution. These results were compared to the previously published data as well as with the current class at the originating institution. An additional level of assessment was added to this iteration of the OME through the establishment of a rubric for evaluating the students’ presentation skills. Finally, assessment data on students’ engineering awareness was compared across universities. Background The need for today’s engineering students to have improved technical communication skills has been well documented, perhaps most clearly in the ABET criteria 3 . Teaching communication as part of engineering curricula has been tried in many ways, a good overview of which is presented in Ford and Riley 4 . Adding technical communication to the freshman curriculum was one of the central reasons for reforming the courses at ONU. Some of this work has resulted in previous publications 5,6 . The first of these courses, Freshman Engineering 1, includes objectives related to technical communication and exposing students to the engineering profession. As the model of a Scholar/Teacher was being discussed at the 2006 ASEE National Conference Plenary Session 2 , Dr. Sheri Sheppard stated that the scholarship of teaching and learning is distinguished from just good teaching as it involves communicating it to a community that is engaged in debate and publishing and building on each other’s work. In attendance were two of the instructors from the aforementioned Freshman Engineering 1 course who, later during the conference, also attended a paper presentation regarding the OME. After meeting with the other faculty teaching the course following the conference, it was decided to make the OME a part of this freshman course. While the OME itself would not be sufficient to teach technical communication, it provides a forum for students to practice and display technical presentation P ge 12122.2 skills. In addition, students often note that there seems to be a lack of connection between coursework and the ‘real world.’ While laboratory experiences can help students with this 7 , it is also helpful to have examples so that the students can relate course content to their own experiences and interests outside of the classroom. Additionally, the ABET criteria requires that students have a knowledge of current events related to the engineering profession 3 . It is also clear that having an understanding of engineering history can help us learn from prior mistakes 8 . The OME presentations provide the instructors with a wealth of examples that can be referred back to during lectures. They further provide students with a wide variety of examples of engineering and its impact on society. The OME is certainly not the only way in which to achieve the objectives of better technical presentation skills and a greater awareness of engineering in the real world. However, it combines both of these topics in a way that has minimal impact on class time. It also seems particularly helpful for a first-year course, since: “In addition to conveying engineering content, teaching first-year engineering students entails its own specific educational issues, some of which are: (1) attracting and maintaining the students’ interest and attention at a quality level, (2) helping students generate a sense of relevance between class and engineering in the real world, (3) building a foundation to their technical presentation skills, (4) motivating them to be interested and inspired by engineering as a career, (5) making them feel part of the new academic world they are entering, and (6) allowing them to contribute to and participate in their own education 1 .” As part of the implementation process, one of the Freshman Engineering 1 faculty members contacted the instructor who had originally developed the OME, who agreed to assist with this process, provide copies of handouts, pursue cooperative research in this area, help with the assessment of the results, and to co-author this paper. This collaboration, which was one of the objectives for presenting OME at ASEE, started a dialog on how to best iterate and customize the existing OME model for programs at other universities. The adjustments, implementation, and outcomes will be discussed below. The OME assignment The students were provided with the handout found in Appendix I. While the appendices present the handouts given at one of the universities, they are very similar to those used by the other. There were 150 students at ONU spread across five sections and 57 students at NU in two Engineering Design course sections. Because of variations in class sizes, schedules, etc., there was some variation in how faculty decided to implement the OME presentations. For example, some sections had one presentation per day whereas others had as many as three per day. Some faculty had students volunteer for time slots, but others assigned them. In all sections, every student was required to give a presentation, and all were evaluated using the same rubric (see Appendix II). In addition, students filled out common preand post-surveys (see Appendixes III and IV). P ge 12122.3 Complete details of the basic assignment are presented in the original paper 1 ; however, a brief overview is given here. Students selected an engineering-related topic that was from either a product, a current event, a vocabulary, or a biography category. Students were allowed to choose their own topic and category, but were required to contact the instructor ahead of time via email in order to ensure that the topic was relevant, unique, and of a reasonable scope. Topics were selected on a first-come, first-served basis. Presentations were ideally one minute and up to two minutes. Students were allowed to use PowerPoint only for the presentation of visual aids (photos, diagrams, etc.). In general, this was done at the beginning of each class period, though in one section where multiple students presented each day, one presentation was done at the end of the class period. Assessment Several forms of assessment were completed in this course. First, students completed preand post-surveys on a 5-point Likert scale. Second, the post-survey included several open-ended questions for student reflection. Third, faculty reflection was used. Finally, a rubric was used to evaluate the OME presentations. Each of these will be discussed in this section. Figure 1 is a graph summarizing the 144 student responses to the pre-survey found in Appendix III, specifically to the questions: “I feel aware of engineering issues in history.” “I feel aware of engineering issues in my surroundings.” “I feel aware of the engineering issues in current world events.” Figure 2 shows the previously-published data from NU with 57 students responding to the same questions. In order to view a quick comparison, Table 1 shows the average response (based on a 5-point Likert scale with 5 indicating ‘Strongly Agree’) to each of the questions. The table shows that the average response is higher at ONU than at NU, particularly in the category of History.