Whew! We made it. 14 days at three hours and fifteen minutes per day. Over the past half of the course I have not written reflections each day. But nothing has changed...
The value of "my response" and quiz results has been immense. Each day I spend 30-40 minutes before class digesting this information and using it to craft my approach to the first hour of class. This led to a multitude of valuable student-teacher dialogues. Often we went past one hour and closer to 90 minutes.
As a class we divided our time, attention, and learning three ways:
*Conceptual learning
*Applications learning
*Meeting the challenge of designing a spreadsheet that would analyze the forces in a 3-d octahedral truss that is 180 feet high with 37 levels and could be used to support home-size wind turbines.
*Conceptual learning was accomplished through: pre-discussion the day before, OLI modules at night, post-discussion the day after, and a near daily organization of the cumulative conceptual learning. Today students turned in a "learning report" that includes a self-developed statics concept map, a list of statics concepts learned, and for each concept learned: description of concept, current confidence level in the concept (low, medium, high), and what steps will be taken to continue learning that concept beyond this course. As I write this the students are taking the SCI.
*Applications learning: We learned how to solve the following problems, did one or two per day for homework, and had a 100 point test each day that entailed solving one of these application problems: 2d equil of pt, 2d equil object, 3d eq pt, static equivalency, shear and moment diagrams, centroids, moment of inertia and parallel axis theorem, truss analysis by both methods.
*Truss design - we spent one hour per day on this topic by the end the students broke the truss down by level (9 unkown two-force members per level), and were able to use excel to analyze the truss given any loadings. We had a community member whose idea it is to bring the truss to market spend this hour with us each day to add context to the problem.
Assessments:
force concept inventory - pre
motivates strategies for learning questionnaire - pre and post
University of Colorado pencil/paper 7 question concept test - post
ICC Engineering 3 question fe-like comp exam - post
daily 100 point exam (applications)
Final exam (5 applications problems, 3 essay questions on learning)
Student responses to OLI - suggested improvements, things they liked, and an answer to the question if the course were to be done again would they prefer: OLI, reading text, or neither.
The next post will have the results of the student response to OLI.
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