More Material and More Immaterial

Abstract

Engineering courses traditionally rely on lectures and in-person labs to teach concepts that are difficult to grasp. Instructors and students have developed coping mechanisms to meet desired grade outcomes. In addition, with some lessons learned from 2020, remote education is increasingly becoming accepted and is often required. Remote education often takes the form of video lectures, making it difficult to keep students engaged and to provide experience in domains that benefit from experiential learning.

Higher level engineering course instructors are increasingly developing more flexible ways of teaching, including low-cost individualized projects and interactive video lessons. These flexible methods are showing promising results, with hundreds of thousands of YouTube channel subscribers, tens of thousands of low-cost kits sold, awards for these instructors, and research showing the benefits of these flexible teaching methods. With remote education becoming incorporated into the new norm, we envision a world in which flexible teaching methods combined with traditional methods create a palette for instructors to use, catering to their teaching styles, the courses taught, and the students’ methods of learning.

We propose a panel of experts in these flexible teaching methods to share the current innovations, successes, and lessons learned with attendees. Our panel includes world renowned experts in controls education from Matlab Tech Talks, Kennesaw State University, University of South Alabama, Brigham Young University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, who combined have over 51 years of experience instructing, 263 publications, and multiple low-cost kits currently available.

By sharing these ideas through ACC, we hope to give attendees broad exposure to flexible engineering education teaching methods, both accelerating the development of these flexible methods as well as providing attendees an understanding of the paths in existence so they can build their own paths using these tools.