Technology Enabled Support Modules For The Inverted Entrepreneurial Classroom

For most engineering disciplines, the curriculum is fairly constrained. Although the new ABET criteria has increased the flexibility to develop a responsive and adaptive curriculum, developing value added curriculum remains a significant challenge. To respond to this challenge, Industrial Engineering has incorporated a modular approach to courses in the business and entrepreneurship area. While use of the modular approach provides increased flexibility for students, it also tends to compress curricular content which significantly increases the challenge of incorporating engaged pedagogies within the classroom. To provide a balance between active learning and increased flexibility, courses were divided into skills oriented classes and courses with a significant active learning component. Skills classes make extensive use of a multi-media approach and independent study options. For courses requiring extensive use of active learning components, an inverted classroom approach is used to provide more extensive delivery of content outside of the regular class time. This paper discusses some of the pros and cons of the inverted classroom, provides some examples of multi-media content delivery, and some preliminary assessment data utilizing this approach. The Changing Environment Calls for greater accountability in higher education are more strident than ever. The shift to a global economy, the move to lean management structures, and the need to serve an increasingly diverse learning community requires a new approach to engineering education. It requires a transformative curriculum that not only embraces the changing requirements sought by industry, it requires a model that develops the complex thinking skills required to help industries be successful in today’s global market place. While industry and various university advisory boards express a number of issues and proposed attributes for successful engineers of 2020, these attributes and issues may almost always be couched within the following pedagogical concerns: There is a need to construct engineering curriculum so as to serve more diverse learners. There is a need to help students develop better complex thinking skills. There is a need to provide learning environments that more actively engage students on multi-disciplinary team projects. There is a need to create an opportunity for value added curriculum, particularly in the areas business, management, and leadership skills. To do this is going to require more active and engaged pedagogies that usually provide some opportunity for experiential learning. In the past, such opportunities were generally restricted to laboratory courses and to capstone design, but much more will be expected in the future. The engineering classroom of the future will almost certainly require active/collaborative learning components in most engineering courses. These P ge 13189.2 components will include team based projects, service learning components, technology enabled support components, inverted classrooms, and a better integration of curricular and co-curricular components. Herein lies the challenge. To do this effectively is going to require resources and faculty time. System constraints work against this. At a time when greater resources need to be available for engineering education, most state funded engineering schools operate in an increasingly constrained environment. Industrial Engineering embarked on a long term transformative curriculum seven years ago with three fundamental goals in mind. Specifically, within system and logistical constraints, the curricular components should address a number of alternative learning styles. Secondly, the curriculum should engage the students at a deeper level in terms open ended questions and creative problem solving. And, third, to the extent possible, the curriculum should provide opportunities for students to incorporate the value added skills within the confines of the existing curriculum. To accomplish these goals, the Industrial Engineering program at SDSM&T adopted a transformative approach that focuses on developmentally appropriate integrative threads throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Curricular elements of the threads include technology enabled learning, service learning, business plans, and enterprise team projects. Curricular elements are placed within the curriculum to provide both an integrative thread between the major components as well as a developmental thread for improving complex thinking skills. The primary role of the technology enabled support modules is to provide the foundational scaffolding necessary to develop more complex reasoning while simultaneously attempting to address alternative learning styles. To develop this more fully, it is first necessary to understand the developmental model adopted by the industrial engineering faculty.