Description
During the summer of 2012, a team of four faculty members from the College of Technology redesigned Tech 12000 (Design Thinking in Technology). This course, after its first year of implementation as a traditional course, was flipped and blended. In addition, the content related to achieving the learning outcomes was drastically remodeled. Faculty threw out the paper-based textbooks, lecture approaches and large class sizes. The new course embraced a distributed model of resources including web based text and multimedia created by our faculty and others accessed by students asynchronously in preparation for class. Classes are small (40 students) and feel like workshops where the instructor is a guide and facilitator.
Students experience flexibility and autonomy within a guided sequence of learning experiences. The first half of the semester students experience short duration small group work with structure and guidance as they work collaboratively to solve problems. The problems and approaches are structured to allow students to apply concepts focused on design thinking in a technological context. During the second half of the semester, students work in groups of 4-5 and begin with identifying a problem in their environment, researching the issue, benchmarking, brainstorming, evaluating, prototyping and presenting their work.
Included in
Transforming the Core Course in the College of Technology
During the summer of 2012, a team of four faculty members from the College of Technology redesigned Tech 12000 (Design Thinking in Technology). This course, after its first year of implementation as a traditional course, was flipped and blended. In addition, the content related to achieving the learning outcomes was drastically remodeled. Faculty threw out the paper-based textbooks, lecture approaches and large class sizes. The new course embraced a distributed model of resources including web based text and multimedia created by our faculty and others accessed by students asynchronously in preparation for class. Classes are small (40 students) and feel like workshops where the instructor is a guide and facilitator.
Students experience flexibility and autonomy within a guided sequence of learning experiences. The first half of the semester students experience short duration small group work with structure and guidance as they work collaboratively to solve problems. The problems and approaches are structured to allow students to apply concepts focused on design thinking in a technological context. During the second half of the semester, students work in groups of 4-5 and begin with identifying a problem in their environment, researching the issue, benchmarking, brainstorming, evaluating, prototyping and presenting their work.