Asee peer logo

The Learning Portal

Download Paper |

Conference

2001 Annual Conference

Location

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Publication Date

June 24, 2001

Start Date

June 24, 2001

End Date

June 27, 2001

ISSN

2153-5965

Page Count

13

Page Numbers

6.1025.1 - 6.1025.13

DOI

10.18260/1-2--9506

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/9506

Download Count

398

Paper Authors

author page

Richard Upchurch

author page

Judith Sims-Knight

Download Paper |

Abstract
NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

SESSION 2330

The Learning Portal Richard L. Upchurch, Judith E. Sims-Knight University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

Abstract

Undergraduate engineering education is experiencing a paradigm shift, from teacher-centered to student-centered pedagogy characterized by student teamwork and integrative curricula 1. The research and experiences underlying this shift have revealed that effective learners not only learn actively, but they develop an awareness of their skills in learning, and engage in self-assessment and reflection. Research in psychology has found that the reflective process engages students and helps them develop, particularly as self-regulated learners. As the educational enterprise undergoes this radical change, there is an increased recognition of the need for methods that allow students to develop such cognitive and metacognitive skills.

This paper presents our explorations in defining and constructing a system that helps students organize their work, review their and others’ work, and reflect on their progress. The system we are building includes the support tools for student-centered knowledge construction and management. We examine our early prototypes and discuss how our experiences with those systems led to the current system requirements. These requirements include the knowledge/document management, self-assessment, reflection, planning, and collaboration. We discuss the intended uses for the system, and provide examples from our current uses of the system to highlight the potential. The paper includes a review of the literature supporting our work.

I. Introduction

Undergraduate engineering education is experiencing a paradigm shift. An essential feature of this paradigm shift is a movement from teacher-centered to more appropriately student-centered pedagogy. The teacher-centered tradition has been the cornerstone of higher education, with engineering education merely adhering to the dominant doctrine, for what seems an eternity. The teacher-centered model characterizes students as products. As such, the educational outcomes are expressed as exit skills or competencies 2. Catalano and Catalano 3 enumerate three assumptions associated with the teacher-centered model:

1. An(y) educational process is considered culturally neutral as well as linear and rational. 2. Language serves as a conduit for the transmission of information.

Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright  2001, American Society for Engineering Education

Upchurch, R., & Sims-Knight, J. (2001, June), The Learning Portal Paper presented at 2001 Annual Conference, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 10.18260/1-2--9506

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2001 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015