Using Student Video Presentations to Develop Communication Skills

Thomas J. Siller; Anthony A. Maciejewski; Andrea M. Leland; Tom Chen; Branislav M. Notaros; Sourajeet Roy; Adam C. Hicks

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Conference: 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Publication Date: June 23, 2018
Start Date: June 23, 2018
End Date: July 27, 2018
Conference Session: Electrical and Computer Division Technical Session 5
Tagged Division: Electrical and Computer
Page Count: 16
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--31212
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/31212
Download Count: 578

Paper Authors

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Thomas J. Siller Colorado State University orcid.org/0000-0002-0567-0631

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Tom Siller is an associate professor in Civil and Environmental engineering at Colorado State University. He has been a faculty member at CSU for 30 years.

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Anthony A. Maciejewski Colorado State University

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Anthony A. Maciejewski received the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Ohio State University, Columbus
in 1982, 1984, and 1987, respectively. From 1988 to 2001, he was a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette. He is currently a professor
and head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University. He is a fellow of IEEE. A complete vita is available at: http://www.engr.colostate.edu/ ~aam.

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Andrea M. Leland Colorado State University

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With nearly twenty years combined experience in higher education and private industry, Andrea Leland has distinguished herself as a dynamic communicator and tireless ambassador of engineering education and research. For the past twelve years she has worked in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University to advance its mission through well-planned communication strategies and relationship building. Leland has played an integral role in engaging industry to guide the department’s professional formation efforts to prepare students for an increasingly global profession. Leland holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Organizational Communications and Marketing from the University of Central Missouri.

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Tom Chen Colorado State University

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Tom Chen received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh. After spending 4 years with Philips Semiconductors in Europe, he joined the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Colorado State University. Prof. Chen published more than 180 journal and conference papers in the areas of analog and digital VLSI design and CAD for VLSI design. Prof. Chen served as the General Chair of 2015 IEEE Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems, and as the Guest Editor of IEEE Trans. on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits
and Systems Special Issue on Design Quality and Design Closure: Present Issues and Future Trend", 2005. He also served as the Guest Editor of the Microelectronics Journal on Quality Electronic Design, 2005. His research interests include VLSI circuit and system design, CAD methodology for VLSI design, and bioelectronics.

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Branislav M. Notaros Colorado State University

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Branislav M. Notaros is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University, where he also is Director of Electromagnetics Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1995. His research publications in computational and applied electromagnetics include more than 150 journal and conference papers. He is the author of textbooks Electromagnetics (2010) and MATLAB-Based Electromagnetics (2013), both with Pearson Prentice Hall. Prof. Notaros served as General Chair of FEM2012, Colorado, USA, and as Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Finite Elements for Microwave Engineering, in Electromagnetics, 2014. He was the recipient of the 1999 Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) Marconi Premium, 2005 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) MTT-S Microwave Prize, 2005 UMass Dartmouth Scholar of the Year Award, 2012 Colorado State University System Board of Governors Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award, 2012 IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Engineering Educator Award, 2014 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Colorado Professor of the Year Award, 2015 American Society for Engineering Education ECE Distinguished Educator Award, 2015 IEEE Undergraduate Teaching Award, and many other research and teaching awards.

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Sourajeet Roy Colorado State University orcid.org/0000-0002-9860-3242

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Sourajeet Roy received the B.Tech. degree from Sikkim Manipal University, Gangtok, India, in 2006, and the M.E.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Western University, London, ON, Canada, in 2009 and 2013, respectively, all in electrical engineering.

Dr. Roy currently serves as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA. His current research interests include modeling and simulation of high speed circuits, signal and power integrity analysis of electronic packages, and uncertainty quantification of microwave/ RF circuits.

Dr. Roy is a recipient of the Vice-Chancellors Gold Medal at the undergraduate level in 2006, the Queen Elizabeth II Graduate Scholarship in Science and Technology in 2012, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship in 2012. He currently serves as the reviewer for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES, IEEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILITY and IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS I: REGULAR PAPERS. He also currently serves as the guest associate editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPONENTS, PACKAGING AND MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGY. His student has won the Best Poster Paper Award at the 23rd IEEE Conference on Electrical Performance of Electronic Packaging and Systems (EPEPS) in 2014.

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Adam C. Hicks Colorado State University

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Abstract

Communication skills are one of several professional skills that are required for engineering graduates that pose difficulties for engineering educators. The issues around these skills include what to teach, how to teach them, and how to assess students’ abilities. As part of a curriculum reform project that is a component of a larger department change effort, three required classes of the third year curriculum of an Electrical and Computer Engineering program have added a knowledge integration component that occurs approximately every five weeks. During these integration efforts, students are required to integrate knowledge from the three courses to evaluate the design of a cell phone. The goal of these efforts is to have the students connect the knowledge across the three courses using a practical real-world device. Additionally, students are required to produce short video presentations to demonstrate their abilities in integrating the knowledge and the ability to communicate this via a video presentation. The video presentation assignment includes several components. To provide scaffolding for the student efforts, a couple of high-quality example video presentations are made available. These videos were developed by graduate students involved with the knowledge integration project. After the graduate students developed initial versions of their videos, they were critiqued by several faculty and then finalized and made available to the students. A time limit of 7.5 minutes was given for each video. After producing the videos, students were required to perform an anonymous peer review of three classmates’ presentations. Additionally, one graduate student, not responsible for an example video, then also performed an assessment of the videos. The students were also required to provide guided self-reflections on their communication skills after they had completed their videos and performed and received peer reviews. Herein we present results of the assessment data collected for this project. There are a couple of goals related to the assessment of the videos. First, a comparison is made between the assessments of the GTA and peer assessments with the students’ self-reflections –looking for areas of consistency. Then a second evaluation was performed where a random selection of videos were evaluated by members of an industry advisory board to look for similarities and differences between their evaluation and the in-house, or academic, evaluations. The methodology for this work includes collecting the text-based evaluations from each constituents. These texts were then coded for emergent themes that are compared across the various constituents. The results of this work demonstrate the efficacy of combining peer reviews with self-reflections in the development of students’ communication skills.

Citation
Format

Siller, T. J., & Maciejewski, A. A., & Leland, A. M., & Chen, T., & Notaros, B. M., & Roy, S., & Hicks, A. C. (2018, June), Using Student Video Presentations to Develop Communication Skills Paper presented at 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Salt Lake City, Utah. 10.18260/1-2--31212

TY - CPAPER
AB - Communication skills are one of several professional skills that are required for engineering graduates that pose difficulties for engineering educators. The issues around these skills include what to teach, how to teach them, and how to assess students’ abilities. As part of a curriculum reform project that is a component of a larger department change effort, three required classes of the third year curriculum of an Electrical and Computer Engineering program have added a knowledge integration component that occurs approximately every five weeks. During these integration efforts, students are required to integrate knowledge from the three courses to evaluate the design of a cell phone. The goal of these efforts is to have the students connect the knowledge across the three courses using a practical real-world device. Additionally, students are required to produce short video presentations to demonstrate their abilities in integrating the knowledge and the ability to communicate this via a video presentation.
The video presentation assignment includes several components. To provide scaffolding for the student efforts, a couple of high-quality example video presentations are made available. These videos were developed by graduate students involved with the knowledge integration project. After the graduate students developed initial versions of their videos, they were critiqued by several faculty and then finalized and made available to the students. A time limit of 7.5 minutes was given for each video. After producing the videos, students were required to perform an anonymous peer review of three classmates’ presentations. Additionally, one graduate student, not responsible for an example video, then also performed an assessment of the videos. The students were also required to provide guided self-reflections on their communication skills after they had completed their videos and performed and received peer reviews.
Herein we present results of the assessment data collected for this project. There are a couple of goals related to the assessment of the videos. First, a comparison is made between the assessments of the GTA and peer assessments with the students’ self-reflections –looking for areas of consistency. Then a second evaluation was performed where a random selection of videos were evaluated by members of an industry advisory board to look for similarities and differences between their evaluation and the in-house, or academic, evaluations. The methodology for this work includes collecting the text-based evaluations from each constituents. These texts were then coded for emergent themes that are compared across the various constituents. The results of this work demonstrate the efficacy of combining peer reviews with self-reflections in the development of students’ communication skills.

AU - Thomas J. Siller
AU - Anthony A. Maciejewski
AU - Andrea M. Leland
AU - Tom Chen
AU - Branislav M. Notaros
AU - Sourajeet Roy
AU - Adam C. Hicks
CY - Salt Lake City, Utah
DA - 2018/06/23
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Using Student Video Presentations to Develop Communication Skills
UR - https://peer.asee.org/31212
DO - 10.18260/1-2--31212
ER -