Integrated Learning In Freshman Engineering: The Themed Learning Community

The first year of engineering study at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) is the time when we see the greatest exodus of students. Thus we who work with first year students are constantly looking for strategies that will captivate, motivate, and retain students in our engineering programs. Recently IUPUI began supporting the development of what are called themed learning communities (TLCs). Themed learning communities are linked sets of courses often designed with a common theme or focus area that have been designed to attract the interest of a particular set of students. In the fall of 2007 we inaugurated two engineering TLCs. Both TLCs linked our two first semester engineering courses; additionally, in one we also linked our public speaking course and to the other we linked English composition. The overarching theme of both TLCs was the “Engineer of 2020: A national vision.” We continued the TLC model in the fall of 2008. This paper begins by describing the IUPUI campus culture that supported the development of our TLCs. Further we explore some of the organizational challenges that we faced in getting started. We continue by describing some of the interdisciplinary and integrative activities that took place. We also talk about our theme and how we used the theme to broaden students’ understanding of engineering and its role in the modern world. We and our students reaped both expected and unanticipated gains from our experiences. In our paper we present quantitative and qualitative data regarding student reactions to being in a themed learning community. Additionally, we compare the retention data of non-TLC students to the TLC students to determine whether participation in a TLC did make a difference in overall retention of students in our engineering program. Finally we discuss what we did that worked well, what we won’t do again, and why we want to continue having themed learning communities.