Pilot Study for a "Course-Less" Curriculum

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PROPOSAL NO.: 0230681PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Knox, RobertINSTITUTION NAME: University of Oklahoma Norman CampusTITLE: Planning Grant: Pilot Study for a "Course-less" CurriculumAbstractWork in this planning grant would build upon the Sooner City project, which is a comprehensive, integrated, infrastructure design project that is threaded throughout the Oklahoma University civil engineering curriculum, beginning in the freshman year. Freshmen are given a plat of undeveloped land that, by the time they graduate, is turned into a blueprint for Sooner City's infrastructure. Among other things, the project promotes five outcomes not always addressed by traditional curricula, but which are emphasized by ABET 2000: team building, communication, leadership, design, and higher level learning skills. For practical purposes, the original Sooner City project was implemented in the context of the traditional "course-dictated" curriculum. While this strategy promotes faculty buy-in and minimizes institutional cost, the above outcomes may be more fully realized if the curriculum were more flexible, viz, provide basic engineering science skills and tools to the students on an as-needed basis to complete the project. Thus, the objective of this planning grant is to pilot a move toward a project-driven, "course-less" curriculum. In this setting, "course-less" does not refer to "no courses." Rather, there would be "less" of them because traditional courses that teach basic concepts would be replaced with self-paced modules.Specifically, the Sooner City project, through water supply and distribution design tasks, will provide context for learning the principles of engineering fluid mechanics. When students are faced with a new analysis or design task for which they do not have the prerequisite fluids background, the tools will be provided to them on a just-in-time basis via interactive modules. Within this framework, the proposed pilot project can be broken down into three subtasks: development of self-paced learning modules for core areas of fluid mechanics that take full advantage of information technology; development of Sooner City design projects that integrate these modules in a just-in-time fashion; assessment of the efficacy of the methods. Outcomes from the project will provide the needed insight to direct future steps toward a more robust "course-less" educational experience.