Keeping this up

Well, in the hopes of keeping up some consistency, I decided to write a short note today. There are two themes today, relevant to my research and one not.

With regards to my research, I have been looking at the assessment of work-placed learning in addition to the evaluation of an internship program. I'm not yet sure of the exact direction of this, but I think the two will be related. I am looking at a program evaluation with the emphasis on Outcomes and Impacts. As many have stated, the assessment of students in a work environment is very difficult. An article by Toohey and Ryan (1996) does a good job of looking at the literature of the time and determining the effectiveness of the methods used. I always find it interesting (and somewhat gratifying) when I can see the connections between the literature and environment I am looking at or in. The issue now is what has changed and what has not. After reviewing the article, I find distinct parallels between their descriptions and the program I am looking at. Another avenue for examination is assessment in ill-structured domains which is what most work environments are.

On the personal side:

GO HABS GO !!
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Reference

Toohey, S.;Ryan, G. (1996) Assessing the Practicum, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Vol.21, No.3, pp 215-228

One last thing...

Go Habs Go !!!!!

Another Change in Direction...

Let's step back a moment and see what has transpired over the past 3 years. It started with the decision to go back to school and get a Master's degree. The purpose for this was so that I could continue to teach at a post-secondary level. I had been teaching for 5 years and decided that this is what I wanted to do. Unfortunately due to the politics etc, this was only an option if I upgraded my education. I had previously tried doing this online while working but I felt that it was too much at once.
I made the decision to get my degree in Electrical Engineering because that is the field I had been teaching in. I soon realized however, that the skills I had relied so many years ago had left me. I understood the concepts and could explain how things worked in a practical way, but the skills needed to prove these things mathematically were lost to meet. After struggling through 2 semesters, I made the decision to join my EE with education in the form of Educational Technology. I "created" the first ever inter-disciplinary degree with Electrical Engineering and Educational Technology. My next year was spent taking courses related to instructional design and research methodologies which I passed with flying covers. I felt that I had found my niche.
The next step was to decide on a direction for my thesis. I had some ideas coming in, but the trick was to make it relevant to both engineering and educational technology. Looking back now, I am not really sure what pushed me into the area of work experience, but I decided to look at what skills students were lacking for industry and how they could get them. This brought me to the engineering internship program. The direction wasn't really clear, but I met with the office to see what was possible. Well, this changed things again as they offered me a chance to work part time in the office. I jumped at the chance since I felt that this would provide me with a unique insight that would boost my thesis topic. While I wasn't wrong, it has provided me with valuable information, I'm not really sure it it was the best decision. I ended up falling into the same trap that I had before where I was trying to focus on too many things at once. Consequently, this resulted in my "mental block" and my inability to progress to the level that I expected with my research.
Now I am faced with the reality of almost starting over. Here is where I have been and here is where I am at with my ideas:

• Engineering education - I feel that the education we are providing to our engineering undergraduates is lacking. I don't believe that it is delivering the skills and attributes that industry is looking for. I also don't feel that universities provide faculty with the support and resources they need to make teaching a priority. They are more concerned with research and the prestige (and money!) it brings and less concerned with delivering effective education to its students.
  
• Program Evaluation - This is a new area for me, but one I feel is long overdue. This could have two focuses, the internship program or the engineering program. Both I feel are important and relevant and I feel that both need to be explored further. The hesitation I have is in the scope of the project. This could become very big very quickly.

My interests have gone from engineering to instructional design to engineering education to assessment to evaluation.

Where do I go from here? Stay tuned...

A Change in Educational Priorities

I've been doing a lot of reading lately related to learning theories along with what and how we should be teaching our students. I've also been looking at what people (engineers specifically) do in their work. What has become very obvious is the fact that we really don't need the majority of what we learn in school after say grade 5 or 6 except in a specialized way. Now I don't know how this might work, but a redesign and re-emphasis of the entire system may be in order. Now, although my focus has been on post-secondary engineering education, I have seen and read enough to realize that the same problems exist throughout the educational system.
In a study being done in Australia, James Trevelyan and his group are looking at what it is that engineers actually do in their everyday work. What they have found is that very few (even new grads) spend a lot of time applying their "technical" knowledge. The majority of an engineer's time is spent dealing with and interacting with people. Whether this be with co-workers or clients or suppliers, a large percentage of their time is taken up with this task. So this begs the question, what is it that we are really teaching and how relevant is it to the real world?
Part of what got me started on this was the book Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins. It talks about the idea of "backward design" but what triggered these thoughts was the idea around the "essential questions". These are questions that are designed to stimulate inquiry and create a directions for an area of study. As I started thinking about the essential questions for engineering, it got me thinking about the curriculum and what it is that engineers really learn and do. My conclusion is that much of what they learn, they don't use in any real sense. While engineers do need an understanding of the principles, it is more important for them to be able to synthesize and analyze the information in order to determine potential effects of their decision making. So, while a solid understanding of engineering principles is important, what may be more important is an understanding of how the parts fit in with the whole. It's all about context and change. Change the context and it is likely that the whole system will change. This is where the education system fails miserably, especially in engineering. Most engineering faculty are researchers and scientists. Very few are educators or even understand the process of education. They teach the way they were taught, with an eye on the material and little or no outside support. Outside of a few cookbook type problems that are regurgitated year after year, there is little or no effort or thought put into the application of the material. Rote learning and memorization are the order of the day.
My idea is that we start with the first 5 or 6 years and teach our children the basics of life. This includes basic math, reading, writing, etc. From there we work on the higher order functions like self-directed learning and problem-solving. Let the students effectively pick their course of study but do it in a way that allows them to build on the knowledge they have. While this may seem somewhat ad-hoc and difficult to manage, I believe that once the students see the value in what they are learning and realize that they are somewhat in control of their own learning, then they will become much more productive and willing students. By forcing them to sit quietly in class while a teacher rambles on about meaningless facts, we are only inviting the dislike that many students feel for school. Lets face it, other than basic math, reading, and writing, how many of us use what we learned (or even remember what we learned) in grade school? The majority of what we use everyday is what we have picked up later on as a requirement for our jobs. Everything else we have picked up because we wanted to. We had a desire to learn more about arts, history, education, or whatever so we became willing and eager students of the subject. This is when true learning takes place; when we have interest and passion about a subject.