Incorporating Multimedia Content to Enhance and Re-focus Course Delivery for a Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory

While electronic and on-line resources have made the remote delivery of lecture-based courses common place, the importance attached to the undergraduate laboratory experience has, in contrast, grown. Engineering-based knowledge is traditionally gained practically in educational laboratories 1 . Initiated in 1997, the Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory Sequence (MEL) at the Colorado School of Mines was created to provide students with a foundation in engineering fundamentals, skills to adapt to rapidly changing technology, and an aptitude for life-long learning 2 . MEL’s educational objectives have been focused on experiments that span multiple disciplines, extend knowledge, and cultivate teamwork and leadership. From the beginning there were challenges to delivering a uniform curriculum. Instructors wrestle with a “hands-off” approach versus a traditional explain-all-the-steps approach to successfully develop a student’s cognition (instrumentation and data analysis), psychomotor (apparatus operation and sensory awareness), and affective domain (learning from failure, creativity, and communication). Also, it has been observed that laboratory apparatus credibility and data relevance are critical, and perhaps essential, for students to successfully internalize their experience. Preparation in advance of an upcoming exercise is the key to student success, and efforts to encourage preparation have lasting returns. There may be as many as seven laboratory sections for each course in the sequence taking place each week. Scheduling necessitates the involvement of several different instructors to staff the course, each bringing with them areas of expertise ranging from theory, to instrumentation, to data acquisition, to lab experience. The diversity makes the laboratory experience rich, but also presents challenges to optimizing course delivery to individual sections and the course overall. In an effort to enhance the student experience, short videos and slide presentations bringing together collective instructors’ expertise were created to supplement the written introductions, descriptions, and pre-laboratory worksheets that have traditionally been provided. The resulting multimedia resources address multiple learning modes, accommodate the student’s schedules, and provide a host of different means by which students can access the material. The ability to view the material multiple times and concentrate on challenging subject areas appears to be popular among students; it has increased efficiency and allowed for the expansion and growth of course content. The viewing statistics show that video modules are initially viewed prior to the lab period and, again, during the preparation of the final report. This paper will explore the concerns and motivations that preceded preparation of multimedia content, outline thoughts to aid future production of effective course material videos based on experience gained, and offer a qualitative assessment of the changes in terms of the student experience and outcomes. P ge 26941.2 Page 2 of 10 Background The undergraduate educational laboratory is an essential part of the engineering development. In addition to developing valuable communication skills and working with a team, it is where students learn a scientific approach, develop skills working with technical equipment, and form the connections between theory and “real world” application 1 that will make them valuable to industry. To make the student’s time and efforts worthwhile the lab experience should include growth in all of these components. The Multidisciplinary Engineering Laboratory (MEL) at the Colorado School of Mines is a sequence of three, one semester long laboratory courses where students work with instrumentation, data collection, and analysis in practical subject areas that they might encounter in industry. MEL builds subject matter expertise in electrical circuits, fluid mechanics, and stress analysis and helps students understand relationships among science, engineering science, and engineering design 2 . The enhancements chronicled in this paper focus on the second laboratory course in the sequence, MEL II, which uses data acquisition systems and integrated computer hardware and software to conduct exercises that focus on Mechanics of Materials and Fluid Mechanics. When the course was created founders envisioned that it would encourage the development of open-ended problem solving skills, by avoiding step-by-step procedures presented in traditional laboratory courses where students go through the motions to get the information necessary and “fill in the blanks” in a laboratory report without really understanding the material. In contrast, MEL students would be faced with a simulated industrial problem, are provided with a set of references, and expected to design their own experimental procedure...once in class, they assemble the apparatus, perform the experiment, modify their procedure, and report their results 3 . Today, while striving to maintain the founding tenets of the course, and recognizing that there were some unforeseen issues with the execution of weekly exercises, we seek to enhance the student experience by providing additional supplemental material in a video format easily accessible and accepted by students. Problems Encountered The lab’s creators intended a typical lab period to begin with a brief lecture, 15-20 minutes, which might include theory, introduction to the equipment, and possibly some specifics about the material to be tested. During the remainder of the lab students would work from a self prepared procedure to conduct an exercise to demonstrate the engineering principle that is the subject of the week. The instructor and a graduate teaching assistant were envisioned to act as “coach” to the students through the experiments 2 . An overarching challenge arises simply due to the diversity of the instructing staff. Since the laboratory holds 24 students at a time and the program might be required to deliver the course to P ge 26941.3 Page 3 of 10 as many as 150 students per semester. This results in a need for up to seven individual lab sections. Scheduling and availability necessitates multiple instructors, each bringing to the lab a different personality and area of expertise. Some instructors have experience from lecture based courses and bring with them a strong understanding of the engineering principles while others, coming from industry, are attuned with the data acquisition equipment and instrumentation. Still others might offer a special mathematical expertise in data reduction and propagation of uncertainties. Although the diversity of the instructor staff makes the course strong overall, in terms of the student experience, it leaves individual sections lacking in key components. By creating videos that bring together these components, and making them available to all of the students in all of the sections, the breadth of knowledge can be offered to all. Another challenge faced in the implementation of the MEL lab is more of a practical one. Students are not equally adept at the use of the lab equipment used for data acquisition. The course is offered to a diverse group of college majors which includes students from mechanical, civil, and environmental engineering with an occasional student from mining or petroleum engineering. The diversity exists on the instructor level as well with professors and graduate teaching assistants spread across the same fields. The unique collection truly enhances the lab experience but also creates challenges. From time to time students tend to become disengaged if they failed to see the real world application of an exercise to their particular field of study. The videos give us the opportunity to show illustrations and examples of applications from all of the fields to all the students. Finally, we wanted to address a frequent complaint from students who have lost confidence in the equipment used in the lab. Although we are confident that the equipment used in MEL is adequate and reliable, students have expressed sentiments that their poor results were due to equipment that was faulty, unreliable, and frequently broken. Often this was not the case. The real reason for their failure to collect credible data was usually due to a wiring problem, a setup issue, or simply the time it took to begin collecting data. Although, the founders of the program envisioned a high degree of student independence during lab time and prescribed a degree of struggling to enhance the learning experience in practice it was observed that students reached a point of diminishing returns where they became bogged down and frustrated instead of challenged. Their learning experience diminished when the connection between theory and real world application could not be illustrated because the exercise was derailed during the procedure. The valuable part of the exercise realized during data reduction phase, analysis, and the effort invested in formulating conclusion was lost. It has been shown that video-taped experiments can be a virtual substitute for distance learning students and are as effective as the traditional laboratory in attaining the desired course outcomes, and students’ overall evaluation was very positive. 4 Our proposed solution is to use video supplemental material in conjunction with the traditional laboratory experience to provide adequate instruction to help students refresh material from lecture and effectively use the lab equipment to complete a meaningful exercise from start to finish. P ge 26941.4 Page 4 of 10 Project Description The project entails producing two video supplements for each lab exercise. One video will illustrate the engineering principle explored during the week and is intended to strengthen the tie between the lecture based course and real world applications. The second video supplement will illustrate the equipment setup and d