learning and teaching every day
Why do we engineer? We engineer to enable manufacturing!
Why do we manufacture? We manufacture to enable society!
Our entire society is based on manufacturing, this process of taking raw materials and turning them into useful goods. The things we use the things we surround ourselves with even most of the food we eat has been manufactured before we see or touch it.
I can’t say I’m part of the ME Generation, and with that said, or rather not said, I can say that when I want to know something, unless I’m standing next to someone I’m pretty sure knows the answer, the first thing I do is Google it. Then I look for a video (preferred) or a web page that explains it to me. I’m forty three years old, or as I like to call it thirty-thirteen years old. My generation literally grew up with computers. I remember the first PCs. I remember the launch of Macintosh. I was there when our rich college friends first got PCs with color monitors and the rest of us reminded them that green is a color too.
Now as an engineering professor at a world renowned university my colleges and I regularly lament the fact that our students don’t do the reading and unless we somehow make it required they are likely to skip class in droves. I can tell you emphatically that that it is not their fault! If we as faculty cannot engage them we deserve to be talking to an empty room and we are doing them and extremely expensive disservice.
So how do we engage them? I’ve tried things like:
What does seem to work is to interact with them, to have a conversation, to ask questions and pull the answers out of them, to give them ownership of he class and its direction and to act as a guide on a journey of learning. This can be hard to do as you might imagine with a lecture hall full of introverted engineering students. I’ve been known to resort to throwing candy to (at) students who participate in my ongoing conversation and I’ve made it a habit of showing at least one YouTube video or clip in each class. It’s these videos that I think are both part of the solution to the problem of engagement and part of the problem itself.
I’ve been using video as a teaching tool for as long as I’ve been teaching, and when I tell my class that they have to watch “my teaching video” — of me talking about something — if they want to know — what I want them to learn — about that something; it doesn’t matter if the video is any good, I have a captive audience. This has lead me to “produce” a few good videos and a lot of less good, even bad, videos.
A bad video is much much worse than a bad lecture. I know from experience that some students will be embarrassed to fall asleep or even zone out in class but will think nothing of falling asleep in front of YouTube or more likely the’ll click on a more interesting video.
A good video can be much better than a good lecture the students can refer back to it they can share it with others they can help spread that knowledge. A good video is a learning video not a teaching video.