Reusable Teaching Blocks

 

This blog post is, in equal parts, personal musings, an idea and a call to arms. Reusable teaching blocks are an idea that could be very powerful?

The department of Multidisciplinary Engineering Education is charged with a singular mission: to make the delivery of practical teaching efficient through scale. We identify the content and resources that can be shared by more than one engineering discipline and, when there is broad appeal, it justifies investing a significant amount of effort in developing a high quality, reusable resource.  Chemical, Aerospace and Civil engineers may apply their knowledge to different contexts, but they all require a fundamental understanding of, for example, fluid mechanics. Once we have developed a scalable fluid mechanics lab activity for one degree programme, it is really easy to offer it another with a few tweaks to account for a particular context. 

Because our activities are designed to be implemented using equipment in our laboratories, the extent to which they can be shared is limited by the geographical proximity of our students. Additionally, the equipment requires maintenance, space and physical infrastructure, all of which makes it difficult to replicate the teaching we deliver outside the University of Sheffield. But what if we could replicate the model of sharing teaching resources with the didactic teaching of theoretical engineering concepts rather than practical ones?

We propose the idea of discrete, reusable teaching blocks, which are stand alone (or with a small amount of defined pre-requisite knowledge) digital, scalable objects that are used to deliver compartmentalised theoretical content. We feel that the time for this idea is now. After the covid-19 pandemic engineering educators have been kickstarted into developing lots of online resources, and gained experience, confidence and competence in doing so they may not have had before.  The sector has had an opportunity to test en-masse what works well and what doesn't. And students have been forced to embrace new ways of being served content and have identified what aspects they find valuable and appropriate to be delivered in this way. 

The zeitgeist in engineering education is for learning through authentic or problem based approach. This is an excellent approach to engage students with real world applications and demonstrate the value of their knowledge, understanding and skills.  But it is important that we find mechanisms to actually teach the large amount of knowledge, understanding and skills that are required to engineer solutions to problems. Any tools used to make the teaching of engineering concepts more efficient, for both staff and students, allows more effort that can be expended on staff facilitating and students engaging with more open ended project type learning. 

Should all the teaching of didactic content be delivered online and with homogenous blocks of content? Of course not. Individual building blocks used in construction have no form in their own right. It takes the application of creativity and vision to assemble a collection of building blocks into a recognizable and coherent structure. And the same can be true for reusable teaching blocks. We can separate the functions of producing teaching material blocks and the function of selecting, arranging and contextualising them  If the job of producing the contents is done once, done well and used by many different courses, the intellectual effort of the educator, previously used to build the content, can be focused on the curation placed in the context of the disciple. 

The idea of reusable teaching blocks aligns perfectly with the method of flipped classrooms. When learning is flipped, didactic learning is delivered while staff are away from the students,allowing activities that are more valuable to be conducted during the face to face teaching.  Reusable teaching blocks could be used while the students are self-studying and the contact time is used to inspire and enrich the curriculum by articulating how the blocks relate to one another and using the content in the context of the specific disciple.

CDIO is ostensibly a framework to codify teaching through problem based, design/build/test learning to allow quick deployment without the need to reinvent the wheel. Educators can dip into the framework and pull out the resources and teaching methodology to directly embed into their curricula. While problem based learning and design/build/test are engaging ways of demonstrating the application of engineering theory to real world problems, it can’t be used without students having basic engineering knowledge and understanding. I mean, it’s right there at the bottom of Bloom, indicating that you can’t do the application and analysis without the lower levels of the pyramid being first being there to rest on: 

What if a collaboration of like minded educators could get together to set up a framework with similar reach and value as CDIO, but for the reusable teaching blocks of didactic engineering concepts? Wouldn’t that be valuable for all engineering educators? We would be very interested in joining forces with anyone that could help make this idea come to life. 

The first step would be to define a framework. Here is my starter for ten: 

In the metaphor, the type of blocks we are imagining about are more like wooden building blocks than lego (other variously coloured interlocking plastic bricks are available).  Lego blocks have a pre-defined orientation and limited ways in which they can interconnect. Reusable teaching blocks should be more like wood teaching blocks that can be oriented and arranged to build any conceivable structure. The concepts are the blocks, the educator is the architect designing the structure and the disciple context is the glue that holds the blocks together in the chosen form. To allow facilitate this, reusable blocks should ensure:

• They are stand alone or with as little prerequisite knowledge as possible. 
• Where prerequisite knowledge is unavoidable, blocks should be clearly signposted (preferably to other reusable teaching blocks). However complex learning environments can be created by stacking a number of blocks into ‘Elements’. These can be reused in part or whole as needed.
• They are atomistics: blocks should aim to introduce as few concepts as possible 
• Specific applications or examples of concepts should be separated from the description of the concept. Context and examples can be created as additional blocks to form part of the menu.
• Terminology or nomenclature should be fully explained to ensure it is stand alone.
• They are free of decorative clutter, subject or context information or corporate branding.
• They may have associated micro assessments to ensure engagement.