Co-creation in academe can take multiple forms. In this research, the co-creation focus is on collaboration between faculty and graduate students to develop educational modules. This activity is designed to improve graduate education and prepare students for conducting graduate research. In previous work presented at ASEE 2022, we discussed benefits and challenges of participating in the co-creation process. This current paper focuses on how we took lessons from our first year and transformed them into a structure to better support interdisciplinary research, collaboration, and community building.
We will discuss how we supported the process of co-creation by developing a series of workshops to scaffold student learning. Scaffolds are instructional methods and interventions that are designed to foster skill development by allowing for interactions between what students already know and what they have yet to learn. These workshops were designed using the tenets of the gold standard project-based learning (PjBL). The PjBL framework is itself a scaffold that is designed to build research competencies.
Specifically, to introduce a challenging problem or question, we created multiple technical overviews of the cyber-physical system theme of interest that would constitute the eventual educational modules. We scaffolded sustained inquiry by developing a workshop using techniques from the Right Question Institute, and also through a workshop about crafting your message for different audiences. To support the PjBL idea of authenticity, we developed a workshop about core values to help students connect personally to their project topics. To further support collaboration and community building, we developed a workshop to introduce ideas of interdisciplinary collaboration, including developing community agreements and recognizing and responding to microaggressions. Periodic reinforcements of these topics were incorporated as students progressed in their co-creation project. We assessed how students applied these topics through student reflections.
Scaffolding students’ learning helped to address co-creation challenges that were expressed by our pilot group, including not understanding the goals of the project and not feeling connected to the research. Observational data of the current groups suggests that students have better understanding of the co-creation process and are collaborating more effectively than our pilot group students, and focus group data confirmed these observations. We also collected feedback from students about the workshops to evaluate what is effective about them and what can be improved. Students felt skills taught in the workshops such as how to prioritize research questions, construct messages for specific audiences, and perform literature searches and reviews, were all effective and useful as they worked on their projects. For improvement, they suggested clearer objectives and more workshops that focus on technical aspects of the project work would be helpful.
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Engaging Graduate Students as Co-creators of Educational Modules on an Interdisciplinary Topic
Co-creation in higher education is the process where students collaborate with instructors in designing the curriculum and associated educational material. This can take place in different scenarios, such as integrating co-creation into an ongoing course, modifying a previously taken course, or while creating a new course. In this Work-In-Progress, we investigate training and formative assessment models for preparing graduate students in engineering to participate as co-creators of educational material on an interdisciplinary topic. The topic of cyber-physical systems engineering and product lifecycle management with application to structural health monitoring is considered in this co-creation project. This entails not only topics from different disciplines of civil, computer, electrical and environmental engineering, business, and information sciences, but also humanistic issues of sustainability, environment, ethical and legal concerns in data-driven decision-making that support the control of cyber-physical systems.
Aside from the objective of creating modules accessible to students with different levels of disciplinary knowledge, the goal of this research is to investigate if the co-creation process and the resulting modules also promote interest and engagement in interdisciplinary research. A literature survey of effective training approaches for co-creation and associated educational theories is summarized. For students, essential training components include providing (i) opportunities to align their interests, knowledge, skills, and values with the topic presented; (ii) experiential learning on the topic to help develop and enhance critical thinking and question posing skills, and (iii) safe spaces to reflect, voice their opinions, concerns, and suggestions. In this research we investigate the adaption of project-based learning (PjBL) strategies and practices to support (i) and (ii) and focus groups for participatory action research (PAR) as safe spaces for reflection, feedback, and action in item (iii). The co-creation process is assessed through qualitative analysis of data collected through the PjBL activities and PAR focus groups and other qualitative data (i.e., focus group transcripts, interview transcripts, project materials, fieldnotes, etc.). The eventual outcome of the co-creation process will be an on-line course module that is designed to be integrated in existing engineering graduate and undergraduate courses at four different institutions, which includes two state universities and two that are historically black colleges and universities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2105718
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10427469
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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