could be strengthened. Upon reflection, almost all curricular changessuggested and undertaken in the department, in regard to course enhancements, were recognizedto come from Part 1 of the instructor assessment (See Figure 1) rather than the numerical ratingsobtained from the student assessments or Part 2 of the instructor assessment. Part 1 is filled outby the instructor, where a portion of this form requires the instructor to identify strengths andweaknesses of the students based upon direct assessment. Requiring each instructor to evaluatethe performance of each course each semester generates a tremendous amount of ideas toimprove the curriculum in a manner that the numerical data, from either the instructor or thestudents, never does.The
more amenable to theirlearning than in a classroom full of other students at a set time. These advantages addressmultiple levels of diversity amongst learners.The newly found “class time” gained by delivering content outside of class rather than in theclassroom is then often used in F2F courses for activities that help students learn and retaininformation better. Some of these in-class activities could potentially be just as well done by astudent on their own; working on a calculation problem, reading and interpreting a passage,studying and interpreting a figure or graph, reflecting and writing a minute paper, to name a few.Other activities benefit significantly from the interactions between students or students andlearning facilitators
anincreasingly essential skill for engineers. This requires not only knowledge of statisticalconcepts related to DOE, but also the ability to integrate this methodology with fundamentalengineering principles toward designing and understanding experiments. However, currentengineering curriculums have not fully adapted to this need in the engineering industry. In the1970s and 1980s, the absence of sound statistical methods in the engineering work place led to acrisis in US industry where a large percentage of the market share went overseas. This crisis wasfirst reflected in the manufacture of automobiles and then in the process-oriented manufacture ofintegrated circuits.1,2 Only with the industrial investment towards quality, largely through the
the National Science Foundation under thegrant TUES 1245482. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed inthis material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NationalScience Foundation.References1. Ma, J., and J. Nickerson. 2006. Hands-on, simulated, and remote laboratories: A comparative literature review. ACM Computing Surveys, 38(3), 1-24.2. Wieman C. and K. Perkins. 2005. Transforming physics education. Physics Today,58(11), 36-41.3. Perkins, K., Adams, W., Dubson, M., Finkelstein, N., Reid, S., Wieman, C., & LeMaster, R. 2006. PhET: Interactive simulations for teaching and learning physics. The Physics Teacher, 44, 18.4. Finkelstein, N.D., W.K. Adams, C.J