scholarly journals Experience with Online Delivery of an Engineering Technical Elective Course

Author(s):  
Jim Wallace ◽  
Harpreet Dhariwal

MIE 515, Alternative Energy Systems, an engineering technical elective course open to senior undergraduates and graduate students, was delivered as an on line course for Fall 2011. This is the first time an undergraduate engineering course at the University of Toronto has been offered online. The course is also one of five pilot online courses across the University. The move online is being accomplished in two steps. For Fall 2011, a small lecture section of 25 students was used as a setting for video capture and the remaining 110 students accessed the course lectures online asynchronously. A live tutorial was offered once a week. All students were physically present for the midterm examination and the final examination. For Fall 2012, the course will be delivered entirely online, with the exception of student physical presence for the two examinations. Pedagogical and technical lessons learned during this transition year will be presented. The benefits and drawbacks of online delivery will be discussed from the perspective gained this year and compared with our expectations. Student feedback will also be presented and discussed.

Author(s):  
Lisa Romkey ◽  
Susan McCahan

As an initial step in preparing faculty members for the new outcomes-based accreditation process introduced by the CEAB, a pilot workshop on creating learning objectives was developed for engineering professors at the University of Toronto. As the Graduate Attributes will be mapped to individual courses within engineering programs, the need for course-based learning objectives is even more critical; although research already supports the development and use of learning objectives as an effective educational practice. . This paper will describe the process of developing the workshop, facilitating it for the first time, and the lessons learned that were used in developing a second iteration of the workshop.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Harris ◽  
William Heikoop ◽  
Allison Van Beek ◽  
James S. Wallace

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) allow anyone in the public to learn from professors at universities across the world. An internet connection is the only requirement to participate in a MOOC. In engineering, the majority of MOOCs are targeted at self-learners, and consequently most courses are based on introductory undergraduate courses. The University of Toronto offered its first advanced engineering MOOC entitled, “Wind, Waves & Tides” based on a mixed fourth-year undergraduate and graduate level course. A total of 11,723 students registered in the course, and 617 students completed the course in its entirety. The following paper describes the experience of teaching a niche interest MOOC and the lessons learned throughout the endeavour.


Author(s):  
Jon Talbot

The rapid development of open educational resources (OER) and massive open online courses (MOOCs) has resulted for the first time in high quality higher education learning materials being freely available to anyone in the world who has access to the internet. While the emphasis in the literature is principally upon such matters as technology and cost pressures, rather less attention has been paid to ways in which pedagogical practices can be adapted to address these changes. This chapter reports on a UK university where innovative pedagogical practices have developed over a twenty-year period, which enables such adaptation. The development of a flexible work based learning framework enables the exploitation of these developments for the benefit of learners, tutors, and the university. The case study also highlights the importance of quality assurance and cost as key to competitive advantage in an increasingly globalised context.


Author(s):  
Deniz Basar

I started writing this story on the day after the constitutional referendum in Turkey, which took place on 16th of April, 2017. The referendum took place under a State of Emergency which meant that the legal structures which could check the elections were not functioning as they should have been. The referendum was about Turkey’s state system changing into a presidential system or not; and in the case of “yes” to the presidential system, the parliament would only have symbolic power beginning with the establishment of new constitution and current political power would have the legal basis to stay in power forever. The election turned out to be 51% “yes” after the High Electoral Board decided to accept ballots that had not been officially stamped (which “coincidentally” turned out to be approximately two million new “yes” ballots) a few hours before the election was about to result. I was in Toronto on that day, surrounded with my friends from Turkey working towards their PhDs in Toronto like me. My experience as a young person trying to deal in Canada alone had been deeply traumatizing despite my privileges like being able to speak English (with an accent), not being “illegal”, studying at the University of Toronto, and having enough economic sources to live. In Canada I, for the first time in my life, understood what it means to be stripped from my personhood and to negotiate on my own existence. I understood that the best immigrant is the quiet and grateful one, the one who doesn’t dare to see herself as equally human; and I was, and am, far away from that. On the day of the referendum my pride and human dignity were severely broken because of the incommunicable situation I was in (both for Canadians and for my friends and family in Turkey), and this story is about that. I hide it in the allegory to make it speakable.


Author(s):  
Alan Davis

In its 30 years of operation, Athabasca University has witnessed the full impact of the growth of online distance education. Its conversion from mixed media course production and telephone/mail tutoring to a variety of electronic information and communication technologies has been heterogeneous across disciplines and programs. Undergraduate programs in business, computing, and some social science programs have largely led the conversion, and all graduate programs have, since their inception, employed various features of online delivery. The parallel conversion of student services has been equally important to the effectiveness of these processes. The implications of this approach for the quality of offerings, support systems, costing, and the primary mandate of the University (which is to remove barriers, not create them) are discussed.


Author(s):  
Ken Tallman

The presentation will discuss a third-year engineering elective course, Engineering and Science inthe Arts, offered by the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto. The presentation will detail the unique course deliverables, which require the engineering students to, first, create original works of art, and, secondly, to explain how these works connect to engineering and/or science. A key objective in the course was that the students eradicate the boundaries separating engineers and artists, and this presentation will consider the course’s success in this regard.


Author(s):  
David Torvi ◽  
Scott Noble ◽  
Doug Bitner ◽  
Melanie Fauchoux ◽  
Rob Peace ◽  
...  

Since the mid-1980’s, the mechanical engineering program at the University of Saskatchewan has included three core third and fourth-year lab courses, each of which consists of 9-10 individual labs. In 2015 a task group was set up to review these courses, including deliverables, scheduling and links to material in corecourses. Since this time, the task group has taken on the major responsibility for continuous improvement of the lab program, including reviewing student evaluations, making changes to labs, and recommending equipment purchases.  The task group has also been responsible for a major redesign of the lab program, which will improve delivery and scheduling of labs, alignment with core courses, workload of students, and experience gained by graduate teaching assistants. Smaller apparatus have been designed and built in-house to allow students to gain additional hands-on experience. Labs have been designed to build on one another in order to systematically improve students’ general laboratory skills, including the use of data acquisition systems and experimental design. This new approach was used for the first time in ME 328 in 2019-20.  This paper will focus primarily on the role of the task group in continuous improvement, and the lab program redesign.  The new ME 328 course is described, along with lessons learned from the first offering. The task group’s role in moving to remote labs during COVID-19 is also discussed.


2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
David Bevan

C.I.M is on-line. This issue marks the beginning of a new phase of publication for the journal: CIM is now available only on-line. Over its 30 year existence, CIM has been published in several formats and by different agencies. In recent years, CIM was owned and published by CMA as one of its associate journals. In 2004, CSCI purchased CIM and ownership reverted to the society. Since then, CIM has been type-set and formatted in-house and printed and distributed by University of Toronto Press (UTP) and, as in interim measure, the journal was available on the CSCI web-site. This process was threatened by the sale of UTP's off-set Printing Division. Links have now been established between CSCI, CIM and the University of Toronto Library to make use of the U of T Open Journal Access initiative to develop sophisticated on-line distribution. The Library supports journals via the Open Journal System (OJS) management software as well as providing archiving facilities. CIM will remain a subscription journal but, in the spirit of open access, all content will be freely available after a six month publication delay. Access will also be made available to all Canadian Universities via their library websites and authors will have immediate access for submitted articles.


2004 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Peruski ◽  
Punya Mishra

In this study, we followed three faculty members’ experiences with designing and teaching online courses for the first time. In order to complete the activity, the faculty members had to work collaboratively with others across the university. Activity theory provided a framework within which to study faculty members’ collaborative activities with members of different activity systems that had different goals, tools, divisions of labor and accountabilities. In concordance with activity theory, such differences led to contradictions, disturbances, and transformations in thinking and work activities. The results of the study have implications for individuals and systems undertaking technology integration in teaching.DOI: 10.1080/0968776042000211520


Author(s):  
Patricia Kristine Sheridan ◽  
Aidan Malone ◽  
Doug Reeve ◽  
Greg Evans

This paper outlines the design of a new instructor interface that has been added to the on-line Team-effectiveness Learning System (TELS) at the University of Toronto. TELS is a tool that supports team-based project courses by facilitating the development of individual team-effectiveness competencies in students within their teams. Instructors saw the system as beneficial for student growth, but they also saw opportunities for them to get a better understanding of the state of their student teams. As a result, TELS has now developed an instructor interface to let instructors “see” into their teams. The instructor interface has been adopted by four courses since its development


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