Arlington, Virginia
March 12, 2023
March 12, 2023
March 14, 2023
Professional Engineering Education Papers
7
10.18260/1-2--44997
https://peer.asee.org/44997
125
Dr. Jianchu (Jason) Yao is a Professor with the Department of Engineering at East Carolina University (ECU), Greenville, North Carolina, USA. He is currently the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the College of Engineering and Technology. He receiv
Dr. Ricky Castles is an associate professor in the Department of Engineering at East Carolina University. He serves as concentration coordinator for ECU's Electrical Engineering concentration. His research work focuses on the use of wireless sensor networ
Dr. Qin Ding is Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Computer Science at East Carolina University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Dakota State University, M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Nanjing University, China. Her research interests include data mining, database, and bioinformatics. She has served as Program Chair or Conference Chair of International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB) in recent years.
Poll results have indicated that public’s skepticism about the value of college education has been consistently rising during the past few years. Individuals have many more channels and resources where they can receive knowledge that traditionally has been obtained from college classrooms, and existing and incoming students have suffered unprecedented social and physical isolation due to the global pandemic since 2020. All these rapid changes occurring in the higher education space point out one reality: Much needs to be done to both increase the value of attending college and assist the youth, whose normal “growth” has been deprived by the pandemic, with developing essential societal and professional skills for their future career and life. The College of Engineering and Technology at XXXX University houses four academic departments with somewhat heterogeneous student needs. The College has a centralized Student Success Center staffed to support students during their entire college-life cycle: from outreach, and recruiting, to first-year experience, academic advising, experiential learning, and career development. This paper will report a recent project on which faculty from the four departments and staff in the Student Success Center collaborated very closely to build a two-room complex, housing a student-success lounge next to an open lab that encourages extracurricular activities and experiential learning. The open lab, equipped with technologies proposed and integrated by faculty advocates, encourage students (either in certain classes or associated with student organizations) to spend time on “playing” with these technologies to gain experiential learning experience, hands-on skills, and much more. The lounge, while open to all students in the College, serves specifically as a place that invites first-year students to meet up with their peer mentors, build community, and at the same time explore academic interests by observing technologies and hands-on activities next door, eventually making educated decisions on their discipline of study through experiential learning. The paper will present the faculty-staff collaboration, overall coordination, and early outcomes, including challenges and lessons learned from this initiative.
Yao, J., & Castles, R. T., & Pitzer, J. E., & Ding, Q., & Rohrman, M., & Huang, Y. (2023, March), Deliberately Blended Socialization, Mentoring, and Technologies to Enhance Students Experiential Learning Paper presented at ASEE Southeast Section Conference, Arlington, Virginia. 10.18260/1-2--44997
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