Introduction to Structural Engineering (SE 1)
SE 1 is an entry-level undergraduate course for students majoring in Structural Engineering. For this project, I worked with the course instructor, Dr. Lelli Van Den Einde, to adapt her in-person course into a fully online, asynchronous version with hands on labs for the Discover UC San Diego program - a program that partners with local San Diego districts to offer college level courses free of charge to high school students. Students who successfully complete the course receive directly transferable college credit.
Overview
To adapt SE 1 for high school students, it was important to maintain the rigor of a college-level course while recognizing the different modality and audience.
The course structure includes:
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Flipped classroom
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Synchronous lab sessions
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Technical hands-on labs
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Cumulative team Design Build projects
Design Rationale
One of the critical components of the course was to encourage high school students to not only pursue a major in STEM but also to help them see that they can succeed in a college-level engineering course.
Why is it important for students to get hands-on lab experiences in an online engineering course?
The foremost learning objective for SE 1 is for students to build their engineering intuition. After long discussions with the instructor, primarily drawing from a backwards design approach, we began to quantify this learning objective into its components: experiencing first hand the iterative design process, that it's not only okay, but expected, to fail often and to learn from those failures. For Structural Engineering, this meant getting hands on experience with different materials and iterating on physical prototypes.
After a literature review and research phase, we found several approaches to online labs but nothing that fit the needs of this specific course. With this information, we approached the program administration and received a budget of $50 per student to build and mail physical lab kits.
Development Process
In addition to physical labs, the course also included pre-recorded lectures enhanced with custom animations, weekly synchronous active learning sessions, and strategies for building students' sense of belonging and developing self-regulation skills for college readiness.
I developed this course in collaboration with the instructor over a 6-month period (approximately 2 academic quarters). This includes the initial design ideation, outcomes and curriculum mapping, media development, content development, Canvas building, and instructional staff training.
I consulted with the instructor to create bespoke animations and lecture slides to make complex engineering concepts more digestible for learners. For the multimedia, we worked with our campus media services to film professional lectures in the studio. I provided the lecture slides, animations, and B-Roll assets, which the media team cut into seamless lecture videos for the course.
How It Went
We learned a lot after our initial run of the course - including items to iterate on, and where we could add further clarity to support students. We surveyed students at the end of the course to gather feedback and identify areas for improvement in future offerings.
Overall, we found that students performed very well, with the majority receiving an A or B grade. It's essential to reiterate that the rigor of the course was the same as that of the enrolled undergraduates.
Student Feedback: Reinforcing Learning
“Some of the aspects that I find most helpful…are the labs, as we did experiments that helped us understand it in creative ways.”
Demonstrated Competencies
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Deliver effective and engaging presentations.
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Facilitate meetings to achieve agenda and goals.
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Use appropriate tools to communicate with learners, clients, and other stakeholders.