College of Engineering eLearning Initiative
From ETS
ETS and Engineering’s eLearning Initiative
The College of Engineering’s eLearning Initiative is a shared project with ETS and the Leonhard Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Education. The initiative aims to expose undergraduate students within the College of Engineering to issues of globalization, ethics, and societal contexts in engineering practice. In addition the initiative will require that students demonstrate an ability to work with and lead collaborative projects, including virtual/distributed work teams.
Courses under development include topics such as technology ethics, globalization, leadership, and entrepreneurship. The initiative will also assess the long-term viability of cross-campus courses, affording students first-hand experience with working in a distributed team environment. Finally, the initiative’s goals include an exploration of student portfolio tools, specifically how best students can capture evidence of learning in the areas of ethics, global awareness, and leadership.
Personnel:
Gary Chinn - instructional design
Sarah Zappe - assessment
Jason Heffner - programming support
Faculty: Steven Walton - STS 233
Faculty: Veena Raman - STS 297A
Courses:
STS 233: Ethics & the Design of Technology (Spring 2008)
Description of Course:
Teaching ethics is increasingly a component of science and engineering professional education. This in part reflects increasing requirements for program accreditation that ethics be a part of curriculum, but also recognition of the complex professional and personal issues facing scientists and engineers in modern workplace. It is essential that students understand the concept that science and technology can be used for positive and negative purposes, and thus are not value-free. Developing the analytical skills necessary to recognize ethical issues is essential for students entering professional settings. Ethics education, then, should offer students the opportunity to practice making and defending decisions about ethical issues and providing students with tools to help them develop their skills in formulating sophisticated ethical positions.
STS 233 took place in the spring semester of 2008. The class, titled Ethics and the Design of Technology, explores technology and engineering in American culture and the emerging ethical issues confronting the profession. These issues include corporate responsibility, personal rights, whistle blowing, conflicts of interest, professional autonomy, risk assessment, sustainable development, and the place and purpose of engineering codes of ethics. The course included 20 students, and was taught simultaneously at two campus locations via a PolyCom video conferencing system. Lectures were held synchronously two times per week; the instructor and the majority of the students attended the class in person at Penn State’s University Park location, while a small number of students attended remotely via PolyCom from Penn State’s Berks campus. The PolyCom system allowed for real-time two-way video and audio, and students at the remote location had access to technical support personnel.
The students enrolled in the course represented a wide variety of academic majors, with half of the students coming from the College of Engineering and the remaining half from a number of different colleges. Many of the non-engineering students were pursing studies within the College of Information Sciences and Technologies.
Course Assignments:
Students in STS 233 were asked to create two products as deliverables in this class:
Each student created and developed his/her own individual blog using the Penn State Blogs institutional blogging platform. The class collaborated to create a standardized list of categories, or topic areas, to which their blog posts would be assigned. The student blogs were then aggregated using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology into a unified webpage for ease of reading and tracking. RSS, in short, is a means by which users can easily subscribe to 'feeds' of blog content; these feeds are then automatically received when content is updated. The unified page, as well as the individual blogs, was accessible to the public via web browsers. Students were encouraged to visit each other’s blogs but not required to post comments.
In small groups, students were asked to explore some ethical issues in design (either their creation or their use) and then create video-based “Digital Field Assignments” as a final project. The video assignments were to be between 5-7 minutes in length, and the teams were responsible for the division of work for their projects. Students were informed at the outset of the class that their final projects would be posted to publicly accessible websites.
Blogs Assignment:
The STS 233 student blogs were created via Penn State Blogs, an institution-wide locally hosted and administered blogging platform that utilizes a product called MovableType as its foundation. Penn State Blogs are available to any student, faculty member, or staff member at any of the 23 Penn State campus locations. Students are free to create as many different blogs as they like, and local support is available to resolve technical issues. For the class, students were asked to create their blogs during the first week of the semester. Later, after all the students had successfully completed the sign-up process, the class negotiated a series of topic categories that the students would use to assign to their posts. This allowed for posts to be sorted by topic on the aggregated class blog page.
Students were encouraged to seek out current events that presented ethical questions as a means for prompting their thinking. The reverse chronological order of postings typical in blogs orients them toward immediacy and current events. With this in mind, students were encouraged to explore and find news stories that they felt contained both a design and ethical aspect. In addition to the immediacy of blog posts, the subjective in nature of blogs is in many ways an ideal fit for an ethics course in which personal judgments and reflection are so central. With this in mind, students were asked to locate news items that they found to be of interest and offer their commentary and analysis on the ethical dimensions of the story they had linked to. This process required the formulation of an opinion, and opened the students’ posts to critical responses from peers.
As noted earlier, one important aspect in the versatility of blogs is the ability to embed various media elements from other pages directly into blog posts. This ability to imbed media was beneficial for student posts involving product photographs, diagrams, or short video clips.
Digital Field Assignment Video Project:
The term “Digital Field Assignment” was coined by Mike Reese and Richard Shingles at Johns Hopkins University to describe research assignments in which students collect and analyze field data using digital technologies. Though their focus was a biology course and involved the cataloging of local flora and fauna, the idea behind the term can be seen more broadly as a team-based project that requires students to apply classroom knowledge to the outside world. Challenging their skills in research, observation and exploration, students are then asked to create a project as evidence of learning through the use of digital technologies.
Penn State provides facilities and assistance for multimedia creation and editing in the form of its PSU Digital Commons facilities. These facilities offer software, equipment and training for all phases of production of video and audio materials. STS 233 students were provided with an opportunity to attend a workshop in basic video editing using iMovie desktop editing software. A representative from each of the teams attended the workshop to ensure that all teams had at least one member with some exposure to the necessary tools. Camera equipment was provided on loan from the university library’s audio-visual group. The groups then put together proposals for their ideas, and worked through an iterative process to shape their project focus.
Groups were allowed one round of critical feedback from their instructor and peers, in the form of a rough-cut screening. After collecting this feedback, the teams were expected to make changes to their videos addressing areas of weakness. In some cases, this resulted in major revisions, including re-shooting and re-editing large chunks of video.
STS 297: Globalization & Ethics (Fall 2008)
Technical:
It was determined that Social Ratings software was to be used for the course similar to Digg. The project originally looked at using Pligg, but upon further investigation found the software still very limited to our needs. This may need to be re-evaluated since Pligg has gone through several revisions since this time. The platform chosen was Drupal using the Drigg Module which implements a Digg clone. More documentation for setting up Drigg can be found at http://www.drigg-code.org/.
