Effective Course Redesign Strategies to Integrate Collaborative PBL in Senior Computer Engineering/Computer Science Courses

摘要

This paper presents the accomplishments and comprehensive findings of the NSF sponsored project, entitled "Enhance Computer Network Curriculum using Remote Collaborative Project-based Learning". The focus of the project is to explore Collaborative Project-based Learning (CPBL) as a pedagogical approach to address the learning issues of under-prepared minority students, and seek effective implementation strategy to extend the pedagogy beyond the classroom through a remote learning structure. During the three-year project course, a new pedagogical model named as CPBL-beyond-Classroom was developed and its effectiveness has been thoroughly evaluated in iterative classroom implementation. In this paper, we will analyze this pedagogical model to illustrate how it can address the learning needs of minority students on a commuter campus, describe our course redesign process, and introduce effective implementation strategies to address practical challenges in the implementation process. Concrete examples of course redesign with weekly in-class and after-class instructional activities are provided in the paper and the redesign principles can be applied to other engineering/CS courses. In addition, the paper includes longitudinal study results based on 3-year assessment data to highlight the pedagogical impact on various student learning outcomes. In-depth analysis of qualitative responses also allowed us to develop a better understanding on how different pedagogical components in the CPBL-beyond-Classroom model affected the student learning process. These findings are helpful to other educators who are interested in adopting CPBL-beyond-Classroom to redesign their courses based on the learning needs of their own students.