June 23, 2013
June 23, 2013
June 26, 2013
23.460.1 - 23.460.9
EFFECT OF ACTIVE TEACHING IN A PROJECT BASED CLASSActive teaching is teaching with a focus on active learning activities. A facilitative teaching styleto teach a project-based class on Strategic relationships was adopted by the authors. This class ismainly taught to juniors majoring in Industrial Distribution and is part of the curriculum of theEngineering Technology and Industrial Distribution (ETID) department. In a previous paper,“Project-based Learning for a Class on Manufacturer-Distributor Relationships”(Natarajarathinam & Clark, 2012), the authors described how they incorporated a project basedlearning experience into this class. Students indicated that there was a good deal of confusionduring the semester regarding the project and what was expected of them. They also expressedthat the communication and support that they received from the faculty and industryrepresentatives were lacking. Industry representatives accessed the project and studentperformance as satisfactory while acknowledging that there was room for improvement. With the feedback from the students and the industry, the instructors redesigned thecourse to include several active teaching practices. The way students, instructors and the industryrepresentatives interacted was significantly changed to facilitate active learning. Teacher • In Class Exercises speciﬁcally designed to help with concepts used in project • Breaking the project down into several milestones • Feedback and/or face-‐to-‐face meeDng with groups for each project milestone Industry Student • Project Champions • Deﬁning roles for each group member • Working in same groups for all class acDviDes • In Class PresentaDons for each project milestone Some of the changes to the class included: • Identifying an industry project champion for each of the five topics being researched by the student groups • Requiring each group to select one student to be designated to communicate with their industry project champion • Class exercises were made specific to the project • Presentations were made by each group to the class during the semester so that the instructors could better monitor and support student progress, plus allow students more exposure to what was being developed in groups other that their ownIn this article, the various active teaching activities designed will be discussed in detail.Assessments by students at the conclusion of the course to which the changes were made weremuch more positive and indicated that while the students were stilled challenged they found theproject experience more rewarding and less confusing. The assessment methodology and thereasons for the change in assessments both by industry and students will be discussed in thearticle as well.Natarajarathinam, M. and Clark, N. Project-based Learning for a Class on Manufacturer-Distributor Relationships(2012) ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings, 8 p.
Clark, N., & Natarajarathinam, M. (2013, June), EFFECT OF ACTIVE TEACHING IN A PROJECT BASED CLASS Paper presented at 2013 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia. https://peer.asee.org/19474
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