Experiments in Active Learning through Project Across Courses

Abstract

Active learning is an effective technique for imparting domain knowledge and life skills. How-ever, it is an extremely resource hungry model. The proposed work shows the implementation of active learning for an engineering program in a constrained environment. It uses a project spanning across multiple courses, taught by different faculty, as a technique for active learning. With an aim to experiment with this technique, students were given challenging real-world problems. The proposal describes the goals of these pedagogic experiments, design constraints, projects content, deliverables, implementation methodology, and quantitative analytics. The ef-fectiveness of ongoing experiments has been assessed over three years with more than 200 stu-dent participants. Statistical analysis and student’s satisfaction survey reveals that a project across courses increases the intrinsic motivation of a student while imparting domain knowledge and life skills.

Experiments with Multinational Cross-Course Project

“…The key idea is to share projects across two complementary courses in the semester. It enhances the project's scope, allows multiple faculty to interact, and students develop domain and life skills [10]. A cross-course collaborative PBL has shown improvement in student retention and confidence [10].…”

“…It enhances the project's scope, allows multiple faculty to interact, and students develop domain and life skills [10]. A cross-course collaborative PBL has shown improvement in student retention and confidence [10]. Another attempt at cross-course projects uses data management concentrations [11].…”

“…Thus it is seen that the projects for improving competencies have the following aspects: They are strategically funded by the governments [4]- [8] or driven by the university [9] in the specific area. It involves the industrial partner to support the project; a cross-course project involves complementary courses from the same university or organization [10]- [12]. Such experiences usually target senior year courses or capstone projects [11]- [12]; a student team may visit the host university under International exposure programs [13].…”