Dissemination of Innovations from Educational Research Projects: Experience with Focused Workshops

摘要

During 1996, we formed the Laboratory for Innovative Technology and Engineering Education (LITEE). The mission of the laboratory is to develop and disseminate innovative instructional materials that bring real-world issues into classrooms, using multimedia information technologies and cross-disciplinary teams. We have developed seven multimedia case studies partnering with industries to bring real-world engineering problems into classrooms. The case studies illustrate how a problem in an industry is analyzed and solved. The format chosen by us enabled the students to experience the problem as it happened and develop and compare their solutions with what happened in the industry. These innovative educational materials received several awards including the Thomas C. Evans, Jr., Instructional Unit Award of ASEE Southeastern Section, Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware of NEEDS, and ASME Curriculum Innovation Award. In order to disseminate these materials to other faculty, we tried the normal ways such as presentation in conferences, publication in journals, and marketing of these materials through a traditional publisher. We found that these methods were not that effective in reaching the engineering educators. This realization seems to corroborate the analysis reported in the NSF Report on the Evaluation of the Instructional Materials Development (IMD) Program. This report states that large publishers and professors shy away from reform-oriented instructional materials because they are new and controversial and that a major barrier faced by the developers was the perceived absence of a market for reform-oriented materials. We then developed a focused workshop during May 2000 with sponsorship from the National Science Foundation wherein faculty were provided an opportunity to get hands-on experience with the use of our multimedia case studies. This workshop was very successful, and the evaluation results encouraged us to offer two more workshops during 2001. The feedback and evaluation of these workshops have been extremely positive, and we have now formed partnerships with faculty members in several universities in order to disseminate these educational materials. In this paper, we share our experience of running these focused faculty workshops and discuss the evaluation and feedback received from the participants. We conclude that "focused workshops" are an excellent means of disseminating innovative educational materials developed by faculty.