National Science Foundation (CCLI-1 Award #0941950)

As educational technology becomes an integral part of the instructional engineering landscape and distance education becomes accepted practice, the need to understand how students learn engineering becomes intertwined with the need to understand how computer mediated communication helps and hinders learning. We have chosen to focus on the use of Wikis because we believe in their pedagogical potential and propose that new metrics for assessment will facilitate the understanding of how students learn and how to motivate adoption.

The main proposal focuses on three inter-related ways in which Wiki use can be exploited for education. We propose to do the following: 1. Develop and study new and ongoing Wiki-based engineering projects, and compare their adoption to Wiki projects in non-engineering courses. 2. Create instructional (pedagogical) assessment tools based on discourse analysis and course topic ontology for qualitatively evaluating student Wiki use. 3. Identify scaffolding opportunities such as automated recommender interfaces to promote student engagement and collaboration.

The proposed work will address the question of how students best learn the ideas, principles, and practices to become creative and innovative engineers, and how this learning is measured. Evaluation variables will include differences in course grades, student interest in STEM, and student variables such as gender and ethnicity. The project’s intellectual merit lies in the new discourse-ontology-based instruments that will help instructors and education researchers assess student learning within a Wiki environment qualitatively, and with respect to the particular domain being studied. The combined use of new and traditional instruments to study the use and adoption of Wikis in an engineering context will contribute to our understanding of how students learn engineering in a collaborative, “real-world” medium. Codifying best practices for Wiki use may have broad and potentially a transformative impact on the way engineering is taught. The project utilizes tools developed under a retiring NSF CCLI grant.