The Synthesis Coalition: Information Technologies Enabling a Paradigm Shift in Engineering Education

Abstract

The Synthesis Coalition is building a hypermedia courseware database and Internet-mediated learning environments to enable a paradigm shift in engineering education in the United States. The courseware development is directed towards adding synthesis concepts throughout the curricula, with emphasis on multidisciplinary content, teamwork, hands-on experience, open-ended problem formulation and solving, and examples of "best practices" from industry. The learning environments use state-of-the-art information technologies to promote teaching and learning models that recognize that engineering is a complex sociotechnical activity.

1.0 The Synthesis Coalition

The Synthesis Coalition, supported by the National Science Foundation and industrial partners, is comprised of the following eight educational institutions: California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Cornell, Hampton, Iowa State, Southern, Stanford, and Tuskegee Universities, and the University of California at Berkeley [1]. Synthesis is developing curricular models for a paradigm shift in engineering education in the United States. The National Engineering Education Delivery System (NEEDS) is the name of the architecture developed to enable new pedagogical models based on Internet-mediated environments for learning [2-3].

2.0 Information Technologies Support Synthesis Curricular Reform

Synthesis is developing blueprints for model programs that will systematically restructure our undergraduate curricula to meet the needs and competitive pressures of the twenty-first century. Enabled by the infrastructure provided by NEEDS, courseware material in digital form is being developed towards adding synthesis concepts throughout the curricula, with emphasis on:

  1. Synthesis Interdisciplinary Content: Synthesis curricula exposes students to creative synthesizing and open-ended problem solving experiences, teaching process in addition to content. It emphasizes interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary areas of engineering that are critical to national competitiveness.
  2. Concurrent Engineering and Industry Practice: Concurrent engineering and life-cycle design are important aspects of Synthesis curricula. Because concurrent application of multiple disciplines through the design cycle often require team design experience, team building and group experiences are an integral part of the learning environment. Industry "best practices" are brought into the classroom through involvement in Synthesis projects and multimedia case studies of engineering design.
  3. Laboratory/Hands-On Experience: The laboratory courses offer students hands-on experience in solving open-ended engineering problems requiring teamwork, experimental design, and the integration of phenomenological theory with actual system behavior. The computer is central in the laboratory experience in controlling experiments and providing data acquisition, system modeling, and data analysis capabilities.
  4. Communication and Social Context: Engineering is a social activity. The engineer as a decision-maker must be able to evaluate and communicate the social implications of technology. The engineer as a driver of product realization must work with multidisciplinary teams, customers, and vendors. Synthesis curricula provides opportunities for students to develop their written, verbal, and graphical communication skills. Design opportunities allow students to participate in teamwork with people of different levels of experience and diverse backgrounds. Societal factors and sensitivity to ethnic and cultural diversity are important element in synthesis curricula.
  5. Advanced Delivery Systems and Learning Environments: NEEDS will drive revolutionary change in the classroom. Courseware modules must be designed for easy update and effective use in a wide range of settings, including classrooms, laboratories, and other student environments. Courseware must be designed to encourage active learning and accommodate different learning styles among the student population. It must also emphasize creative use of time with less drudgery and rote lectures. NEEDS will facilitate rapid transfer of new technologies into the curriculum through its modular approach and as a shared resource.

The ambitious goals of Synthesis-based curricula, in which diverse elements of engineering education are unified, requires that diverse resources be available to an instructor through a national database to be retrieved and assembled into a unified course. To meet this need, collections of modular, digital courseware and courseware elements highlighting synthesis concepts and pedagogy are being cataloged within the NEEDS database in several forms. Courseware elements are the constitutive quanta of courseware modules and include information and activities in a variety of media. Courseware modules are designed such that interesting elements can be distilled from several modules and joined together to create new customized modules. There exist arbitrarily many hyper linked "curriculum paths" through the courseware curriculum matrix, some of them already mapped by existing courseware modules, others to be assembled ad hoc in response to specific teaching goals or user interest. The NEEDS architecture supports these varied access and usage modes for courseware. Examples of types of courseware elements are:

Fig. 1: Synthesis-rich curriculum matrix in the NEEDS database.

3.0 NEEDS: National Engineering Education Delivery System

NEEDS is an entirely new courseware development and distribution system which provides widespread, global Internet access to potentially an almost arbitrarily large number of diverse material to support engineering education. Material in NEEDS is organized by a broad variety of search indices. This "electronic library" is already freely available to the more than three million users of the global Internet.

NEEDS consists of three major components:

  1. the NEEDS distributed database, server and access system
  2. the NEEDS courseware development studios, and
  3. the NEEDS delivery systems/learning environments.

The NEEDS concept includes all aspects of full fledged academic publishing: authoring, editing, reviewing, publicizing, distributing, protecting, and rewarding intellectual contributions. Courseware studios help authors develop professional quality courseware for instruction and archival on the database. Students can access the database directly from a wide range of high technology learning environments. NEEDS is evolving to more than an electronic library and publishing activity; it is becoming a national network information center for engineering education. When users contact NEEDS they enter the root of an extensive information tree, one important branch of which is the on-line library.

Fig. 2: NEEDS (The National Engineering Educational Delivery System).

3.1 High Technology Learning Environments

NEEDS promotes Synthesis thinking and provides opportunities not possible with the traditional classroom model. NEEDS delivery systems/learning environments consist of a range of high technology environments (including classrooms, computer and experimentation labs, libraries, design studios and small study groups) that have access to the NEEDS database, and are capable of presenting the courseware modules in real-time. Well-tested prototype electronic classrooms (also called high-technology classrooms) of several different designs capable of accessing the NEEDS database and delivering multimedia courseware modules to both local and remote audiences have been developed. Classroom types range from "high-end" lecture rooms designed specifically for this purpose, through permanently modified to accommodate such delivery, to self-contained delivery systems on a cart that can be wheeled into "ordinary" classrooms and laboratories. NEEDS learning environments go beyond the classroom metaphor and add collaborative learning opportunities using libraries and laboratories without walls .

3.2 Courseware Development Studios

A NEEDS courseware development studio consists of a facility with hardware and software, network connectivity, a technical library, and support staff, that assists faculty in preparing curricular modules. The studio provides a cost-effective approach to the development of engineering courseware by integrating information in its multitude of forms and providing tools to facilitate the authoring process and minimizing the effort and resources required for the courseware development. Courseware development studios may include one central facility at the university level and/or college and departmental installations, as appropriate to each campus. Network connectivity to NEEDS will make possible a high degree of collaboration and resource-sharing between these various sites. Electronic publishing provides one metaphor for the function of the courseware studio and the NEEDS database as a publishing resource and "publishing" system. Authors can set up "virtual" studios in their homes or office by linking to the physical studio through Internet connections.

Fig. 3: Modes of browsing the NEEDS database.

3.3 The NEEDS Database

The NEEDS database is comprised of a distributed set of archive nodes and the NAS (National Access System) provides a text-based search engine over a centralized library catalog with pointers to the digital course material on the distributed nodes which serve it. Multimedia interfaces to the NEEDS database such as NINa (NEEDS Image Navigator-running in both X-Windows and Mosaic interfaces) extend the existing capabilities of current on-line library catalogs by supporting image searches for curricular modules and data elements stored in portable multimedia formats. Browsing in NINa is accomplished through either of two network standards: (1) SQL (structured query language) search over multimedia elements from within an X-Window client [4] or (2) NCSA Mosaic using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Within the NCSA Mosaic interface we have initiated preliminary experiments with WAIS, Inc. (Wide Area Information Services) to extend the search capabilities to include free-form text search using WAIS indexing. WAIS is a means for serving information through a robust, Z39.50 compliant protocol [5]. The fundamental goal of the WAIS architecture is to provide a large degree of access to data without encumbering the user or the server with knowledge of the underlying document structure or location. WAIS servers provide access to textual documents through a large, inverted index on the actual document text (in the case of non-textual documents, the file name is indexed). As such, it provides a perfect indexing tool for HTML documents (it can be `taught' to ignore tags and hypertext `anchors' quite readily).

4.0 Example Courseware and Database Linking

To illustrate the hypermedia features of the NEEDS database, one example of representative courseware will be described. The IBM Proprinter case study [6-7] chronicles the design and manufacture of the best selling dot matrix printer in the world through a series of multimedia presentations incorporating textual, graphic, and video information formats. The presentations are organized around a central navigational backbone, or concept map, which follows the life cycle of the product, from the identification of the need to sell a printer for use with IBM's best-selling PC line, through the decision process leading to the choice of manufacturing the printer in-house and in the United States, through the design for manufacture principles necessary to make a profit in such an undertaking. Manufacturability, specifically design for automated assembly, is the main thrust of the case study just as it was in the design process itself. Interviews with the designers explain the decision process and methods used to reduce part count and eliminate screws, belts, and coil springs from the Proprinter. Video of assembly sequences ably demonstrate the results of their efforts. The design of new manufacturing processes, like that used to injection mold a plastic lead screw used to replace the printer head drive belt, and innovative application of well known techniques from other product types, like the study of toys for designing snap fits, inspires exploration and breadth in developing conceptual designs using concurrent engineering principles. Lessons learned throughout the process include the abandonment of a several mile long flexible automated assembly line for production for assembly of the same design on a compact manual assembly line. This experience relates design for automated assembly to design for assembly in a very convincing fashion, motivating the use of concurrent design techniques to a wide range of manufacturing environments [8].

The SQL archive database at the core of case study collection includes paths to files that store the case study including: design specifications, functional decompositions, artifacts, objectives, models, browse images (thumbnails), digitized video, etc. Each design case is stored as a series of active, hyper linked WWW browser HTML files which link to other HTML documents or supporting information stored in native format (e.g. analysis program input or CAD files). The entire system is accessed through the network, minimizing demands on the local computer system. Because network standard, interoperable interfaces have been chosen for the implementation, the system can also be easily distributed. Browsing or querying the case-base can pinpoint useful information and download it for further evaluation, reducing the resource commitment required of the server. Design case navigation is the primary mode of exploration in the system. It is augmented by hierarchical ontological indexing in the SQL database and content based indexing. All of these features are set in two primary Internet information services: World-Wide Web (WWW) and WAIS (Wide Area Information Service).

A typical presentation of a design issue taken from the IBM Proprinter case study is shown in Figure 4. The textual information describes the advantages of using complex plastic parts to replace the multi-part metal brackets used to locate the paper feed system within the printer. While the metal parts were cheap to manufacture, their replacement reduced the part count in the printer by about 40. In particular, springs and fasteners were molded into these side rails exploiting the idea of function sharing within a component. Design concerns like bearing surfaces for rotating shafts and electrostatic discharge which were not significant in their metal counterparts proved problematic in the plastic design. These issues were resolved partially by reinforcing bearing surfaces with molded-in inserts and adding electrically conductive carbon fiber to the plastic as it goes in to the mold. Other presentations associated with the frame rail design include the layering of parts for easy assembly, the design of the snap fit fastening system, and the design of the molded in spring used to press paper against a moving pinch roller. The navigation buttons at the bottom of Figure 4 can be used to take the user to issues of similar context to this presentation along with menus of interest within the case and links to other cases in the case base (additional extensions are being made to provide access to other design support tools sharing the Mosaic supported protocols like catalogs [8], analysis, and CAD packages). In this way, each case within the case base provides a local structure for browsing; the database provides a means of browsing over many cases, merging conceptual ideas and issues across corporate, industry, or international boundaries.

Testing of the individual case studies has proven them to be very effective in communicating not only the technical information presented in the case but also the rich contextual information that is vital toward supporting open-ended design problem solving [9-10]. These studies are in line with similar results of design studies of `learning to do' which compare hypertext to non-hypertext reference sources [11].

Fig. 4: NEEDS Image Navigator Mosaic interface with blowup on an element of the IBM Proprinter Case Study.

The format of this element is typical of the presentations within the database, synthesizing several information sources into a pointed presentation of a specific topic. Additional hyperlinks are included for navigating around the "local" documents, within the case study through an index or main menu, or outside of the case study through the "connections" button link [8].

4.0 Future Work

We plan to develop a system of "CD on Demand" for transfer of large traces of courseware off the NEEDS database. The user would browse through the database and flag courseware elements that he or she is interested in downloading. If the size of the collective files are too large for convenient Internet transfer (some multimedia files can be quite large), the user could request that a CD-ROM be produced with the desired courseware elements and be mailed to the user.

John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Synthesis Coalition, and WAIS Inc. (Wide Area Information Service) plan to combine efforts to test the marketing and electronic distribution of course materials (beginning with engineering case studies) developed by members of the Synthesis Coalition and other interested participants, utilizing the Internet. The initial phase will focus on tracking patterns of use, establishing and testing security measures, and determining the extent of faculty/ student support needed.

5.0 References

[1] Ingraffea, A.R., T. Henderson, A.M. Agogino, A. Eide, and J. Aceto, "Synthesis: A National Engineering Education Coalition," New Approaches to Undergraduate Engineering Education III, Engineering Foundation Conference, Banff, Canada, July 28-Aug. 2, 1991.

[2] Eide , A.R. and R.J. Thomas, "The Impact of Technology on Undergraduate Education", Proceedings of the 1992 Frontiers in Education Conference, Nashville, TN, Nov. 11-14, 1992, pp. 625-627.

[3] Agogino, A.M., S. Sheppard, J. Harris, L. Genalo, K. Mink, J. Krishnagopalan, L. Genalo, D. Martin and J. Saylor, "National Engineering Education Delivery System, (Ed., Lawrence P. Grayson), Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education `93 Conference, IEEE and ASEE, 1993, pp. 592-600.

[4] Watkins, B.T., "Information Technology: Computerized Catalogs Extend Access to Specialized Collections," The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 1992, Vol. 38, No. 40.

[5] Kahle, B., Morris, H., Goldman, J., Erickson, T., Curran, J., 1992, "Interfaces for Distributed Systems of Information Servers", Available via anonymous ftp: /pub/wais/wais-discussion/Interfaces.txt@quake.think.com or WAIS server wais-discussion-archives.src.

[6] Hsi, S. and A.M. Agogino, "Use of Multimedia Technology in Teaching Engineering Design," Proceedings of the HCI International `93 (5th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Orlando, Florida; Aug. 8-13, 1993), pp. 778-783.

[7] Hsi, S. and A.M. Agogino, "Navigational Issues in Multimedia Case Studies of Engineering Design," Proceedings of the HCI International `93 (5th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Orlando, Florida; Aug. 8-13, 1993), pp. 764-769.

[8] Bradley, S.R. and A.M. Agogino, "Intelligent Engineering Component Catalogs," to appear in AI in Design'94.

[9] Hsi, S. and A.M. Agogino, "The Impact and Instructional Benefit of Using Multimedia Case Studies to Teach Engineering Design ," submitted to the Journal of Educational Hypermedia and Multimedia.

[10] Carlstrom, Charles M, "Development, Testing and Assessment of the Cyclone Grinder Multimedia Case Study," MS Project Report, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, Oct. 11, 1993."

[11] Lehto, M.R., Zhu, W., 1992, "Provision of Reference Materials to Designers via Hypertext", Proceedings of the 1992 NSF Design and Manufacturing Systems Conference, Atlanta Georgia, January 8 - 10, Society of Manufacturing Engineers, Dearborn Michigan.