The Digital-Forward Writing Course

First-year writing and composition courses can be major roadblocks for students as their success in later courses often hinges on their abilities to construct a quality written document. Students enter composition courses with broad variation in their abilities and yet must all meet the same standards of completion. In order to address this inequity, greater opportunities for writing and in receiving feedback are paramount. Yet such opportunities would place a high burden on writing instructors in a traditional course. This chapter proposes the digital-forward writing course that draws on a combination of a number of digital tools and pedagogical strategies that can increase writing opportunities while maintaining or even reducing instructors' time commitment. This information is drawn from a workshop held in 2020 that asked writing instructors, instructional designers, developers, and other educators to ideate on meeting the challenges of the entire student writing journey. Specific tools and a discussion of the value of adaptive courseware are included.

Study and Research Paths to Improve Web-Based Inquiry Learning: Study Case of an ICT Course in Engineering

Many active, inquiry-based learning activities nowadays rely upon the students’ capacity to perform efficient information research on the Internet. Study and Research Paths (SRPs) have been proposed to model inquiry learning, and successfully used as teaching formats in different areas. In an SRP the search for an answer to a generating question (Q0) leads to a sequence of derived questions and answers, which are modeled using a Q–A map. We have investigated the benefits of using SRPs and Q–A maps to improve Web-based inquiry learning. We designed an SRP for a course on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), belonging to an Engineering degree. The class-session SRPs revolved around Q0 questions such as ‘What is a «firewall»?’, ‘What are the main features of 5G?’ etc. Our results, based on the analysis of six courses conducted between 2015/16–2020/21, show that the SRP is an enriching tool for learning ICT: content expands beyond that of the traditional course and is maintained up-to-date. Students are engaged and motivated by the active-search activity. In addition, the SRP helps in improving the students’ skills in searching and selecting information on the Internet. The Q–A maps served both the students, to structure their Web inquiry, and the teacher, to monitor the learning study process.

Remodeling the STEM Curriculum for Future Engineers

Higher education is facing low enrollment, and fewer students are motivated to select STEM majors. This paper reports the results from one university that recently experimentally reformed its undergraduate curriculum to a “theme-based curricula”, the New Engineering Curriculum Program (NECP). The subjects in this study were 127 engineering students who applied for the NECP at a university in northern Taiwan. An experimental design using the pre- and post-test measurements of the experimental and control groups was applied in this study. The results revealed a significant effect among those who participated as second- and third-year undergraduates in terms of their subject-specific performances and attitudes of learning in various courses. Furthermore, the results showed that students in the NECP showed better learning performance and higher learning motivation than students in the traditional course module. The outcomes and analyses are discussed.

Blended Learning An Experiment on Students’ Attitudes

The findings of a number of recent empirical studies on blended learning support this pedagogy claiming many advantages such as the facilitation of independent and collaborative learning experiences. This study compares the attitudes towards blended learning of undergraduate students in the UAE before and after a full course exposure to blended learning, comparing results to the attitudes of students in a traditional course. An experimental research design was chosen for this research study, specifically a two-group pretest-posttest research design. Results show that exposure to blended learning serves as a trigger for changing students’ attitudes towards blended learning in a positive manner and that lack of exposure does not change student’s attitudes.

Blended Learning

The findings of a number of recent empirical studies on blended learning support this pedagogy claiming many advantages such as the facilitation of independent and collaborative learning experiences. This study compares the attitudes towards blended learning of undergraduate students in the UAE before and after a full course exposure to blended learning, comparing results to the attitudes of students in a traditional course. An experimental research design was chosen for this research study, specifically a two-group pretest-posttest research design. Results show that exposure to blended learning serves as a trigger for changing students’ attitudes towards blended learning in a positive manner and that lack of exposure does not change student’s attitudes.

Design and Research of Virtual Reality Course Management System Based on Artificial Intelligence

Today, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are rapidly developing as a new technology, and major universities and training institutions have opened relevant courses one after another. However, the traditional course management system cannot meet the needs of virtual reality technology. Therefore, the virtual reality course management system based on artificial intelligence has become an important technological breakthrough to solve this problem. The purpose of this article is to study the design of a virtual reality course management system based on artificial intelligence. This article first, on the basis of fully understanding the core concepts of virtual reality, transforms the curriculum management needs into actual functions for design, and designs the three key functional modules of the design and research of the virtual reality curriculum management system based on artificial intelligence in detail. At the same time, the software architecture and database of the system are rationally designed, the system is designed and explained, and the key points in the main functional modules are explained in more detail. Finally, combined with the artificially designed virtual reality curriculum management system based on artificial intelligence, the application technology, education application and application experience analysis are carried out through questionnaire survey. The results of the questionnaire show that 47% of students are “very willing” to join the immersive virtual reality classroom teaching, and 40% of students choose “more willing”, indicating that students are more willing to accept the management system model.

The Transformation to an Online Course in Higher Education Results in Better Student Academic Performance

Pandemic-forced remote teaching has highlighted the relevance of redesigning planification in order to transform face-to-face into online courses in higher education. Indeed, the type of e-learning activities, e-assessment and development of student-centred active learning tasks remains a challenge. In this work we investigated the academic performance of an online learning environment in a course with high number of enrolled students carried out in the pandemic context in 2020 and compared it to the 2019 face-to-face version of the course. The e-learning version of the course included some changes regarding the face-to-face to allow active student learning, digital learning environment, knowledge enforcement, and further exploitation of the available activities in the Moodle platform as for the face-to-face course, although the syllabus remained unchanged. This study finds both synchronous and asynchronous problem-solving based e-learning together with self-assessment and team-based continuous and individual questionnaire assessments to be valuable instructional methods that allowed higher student academic performance in comparison to the face-to-face academic student results. Furthermore, the academic performance was directly related to the student participation in both team-based and individual activities during the course, demonstrating that the adaptation of the face-to-face course to the e-learning environment was, at least, as efficient as the traditional course, despite student resistance to e-learning and e-assessment.

Using Free Mathematical Software in Engineering Classes

There are many computational applications and engines used in mathematics, with some of the best-known arguably being Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, and Mathcad. However, although they are very complete and powerful, they demand the use of commercial licences, which can be a problem for some education institutions or in cases where students desire to use the software on an unlimited number of devices or to access it from several of them simultaneously. In this contribution, we show how GeoGebra, WolframAlpha, Python, and SageMath can be applied to the teaching of different mathematical courses in engineering studies, as they are some of the most interesting representatives of free (and mostly open source) mathematical software. As the best way to show a topic in mathematics is by providing examples, this article explains how to make calculations for some of the main topics associated with Calculus, Algebra, and Coding theories. In addition to this, we provide some results associated with the usage of Mathematica in different graded activities. Moreover, the comparison between the results from students that use Mathematica and students that participate in a “traditional” course, solving problems and attending to master classes, is shown.

PSII-B-23 Implementation of a design thinking approach to problem-based learning in an animal science capstone

The objective is to present a strategy for attainment of capstone course objectives using design thinking. Problem based learning has long been incorporated into STEM, and yet inclusion of a formalized design thinking strategy is a novel approach for student-led cooperative learning. Relevancy of content and potential student impact upon the industry was established via the inclusion of stakeholders representing state livestock commodity groups who, via Zoom, met with students to present an overview of challenges facing their respective industries. Students, working in teams, used these conversations to formulate complex problems as the basis of their design thinking process. Subsequent steps of convergent and divergent thinking and low and high-fidelity prototyping led to creation of prototype solutions, which were continuously revised based upon feedback received after deployment. Solutions were prepared for dissemination to varied audiences using multiple communication strategies. Students were required to develop a technical report, scientific poster, infographic, narrated video, and oral presentation. The necessary buy-in from instructors, guest lecturers, students, and stakeholders is significant and a potential challenge to be addressed from the onset of the course. Further, use of design thinking typically requires students to transition from traditional course delivery and assessments to real world situations in which they receive process guidance, but must develop problem solutions themselves. Students required both prompting and restraint to follow the design thinking process. Frequent and transparent communication are helpful in ameliorating student frustration. The student group dynamic was heavily influenced due to covid-19, as teams contained a mix of students physically attending classes and those working remotely. Preliminary feedback suggests that all students engaging remotely via a Zoom meeting helps to create a more equitable and productive working environment. In its first iteration, students are engaged in design thinking and achieving capstone course objectives on schedule.