Bridging engineering practice and learning through cyber-environments

nanoHUB.org is a major engineering cyber-environment that serves over 110,000 annually. Engineering cyber-environments such as the nanoHUB play a critical role in enabling practice within their respective disciplines. They feature a variety of professional grade cyber-tools that are designed for the expert users. However, these very cyberenvironments play a fundamental role in enabling learning by allowing the easy use of industrial strength research modeling and simulation tools within the engineering curricula. We argue that cyber-environments, by providing avenues for learners to utilize tools and services designed for professionals, could offer an extremely authentic learning experience. The literature on engineering learning repeatedly calls for authentic learning experiences that offer learners a natural pathway to engineering practice and vice-versa. In this paper, using nanoHUB.org as a case study, we argue for the use of cyber-environments as a bridge between engineering practice and learning. Introduction to Cyber-environments and the nanoHUB Cyber-environments play an increasingly critical role in engineering as platforms for enabling scientific discovery, industrial progress, and learning. We define cyber-environments as a collection of computational, visualization, collaboration, and data management resources presented to an engineering community through an easy-to-access and easy-to-use online portal. The primary audiences for engineering cyber-environments are, in general, professional engineers, scientists, and researchers. However, cyber-environments due to their ease-ofuse and ease-of-access are heavily used for facilitating learning in the engineering curricula. The nanoHUB (1) is widely believed to be one of the most successful engineering cyber-environments (Klimeck, 2008; WilkinsDiehr, 2008). nanoHUB.org currently serves over 110,000 users who have run about 369,557 simulations using interactive online simulation tools just within the last 12 months. In essence, nanoHUB has provided users with an equivalent of 25,485 hours of compute time [technically, wall clock time] in the last year alone. About 77% of nanoHUB users are researchers, educators, and students at institutions of higher education, 4% are from the industry, 2% from governmental organizations, and 16% are from other sectors. Although, nanoHUB.org is designed primarily for scientists and professional engineers, it offers a range of tools and other content that cater to a wide range of ability levels. Figure 1. Global usage of the nanoHUB and current usage numbers nanoHUB.org now delivers 170 online simulation tools and accesses national computing resources such as the Teragrid and the Open Science Grid. Forty-three (or 25%) of these tools are heavily supported by the nanoHUB team and are used by 76% of the users, providing them a higher quality experience. nanoHUB provides 1,792 educational resources, such as tutorials, and courses – 360 (20%) new added within the last year – that are freely offered for self-study, to augment traditional courses, and to serve as models for new ways of cyberlearning. In November 2009, NCN became the newest of 68 organizations allowed to provide content in the Beyond Campus section of iTunes U (3). nanoHUB has also contributed high quality animations to Wikipedia to enable a larger community to reach the cyber-environment (4). Any major cyber-environment needs significant participation from the expert segment of the community it is attempting to reach. To this end, the nanoHUB currently has content contributed by 659 experts in nanotechnology and associated fields such as chemistry and physics. In calendar year 2009, 116 graduate and undergraduate classes at 97 universities made use of nanoHUB, 50 for the first time. 575 papers in the scholarly literature cite nanoHUB.org (up 145 from the prior year). In turn these 575 papers are cited on average 6.1 times to a total of 3521. These citations give nanoHUB an h-index of 27. Experimental data is reported alongside simulations results in 142 (30%) of the 469 nano research papers. These data show that the nanoHUB is primarily aimed at practicing engineers and researchers. However, it forms a natural bridge for use in educational activities. Use of nanoHUB resources is truly global, with 35% of our total users coming from the United States, 33% from Asia, and 23% from Europe. In the past year, data indicates substantial growth in South America and Europe, as well as some growth in Africa, Australia, and Asia. About 91% of nanoHUB users are affiliated with an academic institution. The use of simulation tools shows a slightly different picture: 60% of simulation users are in the US running 70% of all nanoHUB simulations. This may be in part due to the effect of network delay on the user experience with interactive simulations. In the US, nanoHUB users represent about 18% of all 7,073 US .edu domains. Considering the very broad spectrum of institutions represented by the set of organizations with a .edu domain, we believe that 18% represents a very strong presence for the quite specialized nanotechnology research area. Figure 2. nanoHUB simulation and content usage in engineering schools We have been tracking nanoHUB use at universities that are members of U.S. News and World Report’s list of Top 50 Engineering Schools. In the past four years nanoHUB has delivered a large range of educational content to users in at least 45 of the top 50 Engineering Schools. Almost all of these schools run simulations on nanoHUB, accounting for over 1,200 of our total 7,100 simulation users. The Top 50 Engineering Schools account for about 30% of US-based nanoHUB simulation users. Bridging engineering practice and learning The impetus for using cyber-tools and cyber-environments for teaching and learning in engineering disciplines comes from the need to provide students with real-world, hands-on experiences that utilize a network of practice (Brown and Duguid, 2000) as the basis for knowledge-creation activities. Edelson (1998) points out that “the most fertile use of technology in adapting scientific practice for the purpose of science learning has been in the adaptation of scientific tools, techniques, and resources” (p. 326). Cyber-environments by positioning learners within the larger network of practioneers and researchers allow learners to act as part of an established network or community. Wenger (1999) identifies the role of “social practice” (p. 47) as not only something that is derived from participating in a community, but also as something that provides “structure and meaning” (p. 46) to the activities. By allowing learners to follow workflows of practicing engineers and researchers, cyberenvironments allow learners to associate meaning to the modeling and simulation practices that are embedded within these tools. Therefore, the use of a cyber-environment essentially provides learners with access to the culture of the profession they intend to enter. It must be noted here that in the context of cyber-environments, while students can observe experts at work through various tele-presence tools and tool-sharing, well designed environments such as the nanoHUB make it easier for users to interact with the tools directly – thereby, moving learners to the role of user as opposed to observer. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that learners need to be placed within the larger context of practice in any domain so that they may learn from multiple experts not only the content, but also the culture of that discipline. Also, according to situated learning theory (Lave, 1991; Cognition & Technology Group, 1993; Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989), learners need to be placed within authentic contexts while simultaneously setting appropriate ability levels that can facilitate learning within these environments. The key theme to notice here is that of “real-world engineering experiences” and “authentic learning activities.” Other pedagogical theories – such as inquiry-based learning, problem-based learning, and cognitive apprenticeship (Wood et. al, 1976; Cole, 1985; Spiro et. al, 1991) – also emphasize that students need to be provided with authentic learning experiences in social settings. Cyber-tools and cyber-environments can provide authentic contexts to learners through the process of “harnessing collective intelligence” (O’Reilly, 2006). In essence, cyber-environments have great potential to function as “innovation communities” (Newstetter, 2004) that allow students to form cognitive partnerships with professional engineers and researchers. Defining the Problem and Focus of this Study The goal of using cyber-environments for bridging engineering and science practice with the classroom curriculum is not new. There are numerous cyber-environments funded by various national and international agencies that attempt to achieve this – however, with varying levels of success. It is not clear how most cyberenvironments operationalize this link between practioneers and pedagogy. In this paper, we argue that cyberenvironments, by providing avenues for learners to utilize tools and services designed for professionals, could offer an extremely authentic learning experience. Furthermore, we make the case that it is not sufficient for cyber-environments to claim that just by virtue of providing a set of resources to a community of users they achieve the goal of linking engineering and science practice with learners. It is critical to identify a framework and concrete data that cyber-environments can base these claims on. We pose the question – what characteristics do cyber-environments need to manifest to make them conducive for providing authentic learning experiences so as to link engineering practice and learning? In the next sections, we present our methodology and the resulting framework. Methodology and Data Collection Our methodology utilizes a combination of analyses of system info