University Curriculum Development

The measure of success for courses and course modules with significant smart lighting content is achieving a core set of courses that prepare center students well to do their research. The courses for first and second year students should also help to recruit students to work in the center. Course content should also be easily transferable to other applications such as outreach

Curricula Development:

Smart lighting research has been reflected in three courses, one new and two large required courses for engineering undergrads: (1) Introduction to Photonics Technology, (2) Electronic Instrumentation (EI) and (3) Introduction to Engineering. A variety of new educational concepts and methodologies including Lectures at Home and Homework in Class, Studio Pedagogy based on Mobile Studio IOBoard, and Learn by Teaching are being developed and implemented at ERC partner schools. Feedback is encouraging, strongly suggesting the education program initiated by the ERC supports the development of well-educated engineers for the Smart Lighting industry, and addresses severe budgetary and staffing issues facing the partner schools. The approach can be easily adopted and provides a very attractive learning experience for students for essentially any undergraduate engineering course. The ERC has been working with the Evaluation Consortium from the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNYA) to provide third party quantitative assessment.

An Experiment in Reversing the Lecture-Homework Paradigm:

The ERC chose to fully develop a course that addresses the technology of photonics in this new paradigm. The course was first taught as a small pilot at RPI by Prof. Partha Dutta in the fall term of 2008. Based on the material developed then, the course was offered in the spring of 2010 at four partner schools: RPI (Prof. Dutta), Howard University (Prof. Dimian), Morgan State University (Prof. Sova), and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Professors Berry and Black). This course provided outreach partner schools (Howard, Morgan State and Rose Hulman) a way to participate in the core research enterprise of the center. This course is expected to develop a level of core expertise in fundamental engineering and science disciplines that support center research. Both the students taking these courses (largely upper level undergrads and a few grad students) and the instructors benefit from this course.

This course is being developed in stages. Stage one was the pilot course taught at RPI. In stage two the course was offered at the four schools. Modifications to course content were made by each instructor to adjust the material covered to the local audience. This was necessary as for example, Howard has no other photonics courses and Rose-Hulman follows the quarter system. In stage three (summer of 2010), faculty from all six partner universities will form a collaborative team in order to provide a peer review structure for future course modifications, including assessment from UAlbany.

Lectures at Home and Homework in Class - Advancing Studio Pedagogy:

Based on work by Cindy Furse (Utah) and John Booske (Wisconsin) in their required Electromagnetic Theory courses, the decision was made to record all lectures in jointly offered courses like Photonics Technology. Furse's approach is to divide the lecture materials into short videos (less than 5 minutes) using Jing, posting them on YouTube and then provide a variety of activities that build on the concepts introduced in the mini-lectures, some to be done before class, but many to be addressed during class time.

Studio pedagogy, as developed at RPI in the 1990s, merged lecture, paper and pencil problem solving, computer simulation and experimentation in the same class room. The timing of each delivery component is determined by educational need, not course scheduling. This same philosophy is followed in this ERC course. It was also tested in an undergraduate course at RPI - Electronic Instrumentation (EI). EI was originally developed as a standard studio course requiring access to a very expensive facility. When demand for the course grew dramatically, this changed to a combination of a common lecture with two lab sessions of two hours each, using the Mobile Studio. In spring 2010, common lectures were eliminated as Professor Connor recorded all lectures using Jing (Furse model). He and an ERC undergraduate student (Gavin Anaya) also recorded a large number of supplementary lectures on various technical skills as well as example problem-solving for exam preparation. The Evaluation Consortium will conduct an assessment at the end of the summer that will provide more information on the use of short video lectures in an undergraduate course.

Learn by Teaching:

The development and delivery method being used for the Photonics Technology course allows students at the outreach partner schools to take courses relevant to Smart Lighting and their faculty to build a knowledge base without requiring the instructor to create an entirely new course. Since each instructor is only required to lead the development of a small part of the course, getting established in a new technical area is much more realistic. Faculty from the outreach schools can draw upon the expertise and experience of the faculty at the core research schools to be sure that high quality content is developed. Collaboration among the instructors promotes a higher quality educational experience for the students. To improve the learning experience, ERC students from the three core research partner schools will serve as mentors for students in the classes at the outreach partner schools and cross-institutional project collaboration will be attempted once the course is functioning well.

Implementation of Model at Other Schools

A short presentation of this methodology was included in the HBCU ECE Heads Meeting in November 2009. Because of limited resources and the lack of faculty in hot new areas like lighting, they find it impossible to offer electives in new areas. The ERC's approach to this course development and delivery method has potential for new courses at these institutions with a very small investment. The representatives of the HBCU ECE programs were very interested in participating in this program. The ERC also received positive feedback at the NSF Engineering Education Grantees' Meeting in early February, especially from representatives of other ERC education and outreach programs.

The specific measure of success for the new photonics course is its full adoption at all six partner schools. There is also potential for the course to be offerred at other HBCU schools.