Integrating virtual internships into online classrooms
With the rapid increase in the number of online enrollments, educators are faced with the challenge of ensuring on-campus experiences are available to distant students, which meet quality and accessibility expectations. One of the biggest challenges with online courses is constructing meaningful group projects for part-time students who can be in disparate time zones. As part of our Master's biotechnology programme, offered completely online, we have developed a capstone course for students approaching graduation, which integrates a semester-long project working with a small biotechnology company in the DC metro area into the course curriculum. The experience and results from these projects have been well received by the participating students and companies. We describe some of the challenges we have faced, strategies we have developed, and ongoing modifications to the programme to integrate projects with small biotechnology businesses into the online classroom.
Structuring assignments to improve understanding and presentation skills: Experiential learning in the capstone strategic management team presentation
ABSTRACT In the strategic management course, students select, analyze, and present viable future alternatives based on information provided in cases or computer simulations. Rather than understanding the entire process, the student's focus is on the final presentation. Chickering's (1977) research on active learning suggests students learn more effectively when participating in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The authors highlight instructional changes with students, gathering primary data independently and later comparing findings in a team-based scaffolding process. Statistical analysis of students' self-reported understanding scores both before and following the experiential intervention support the benefits. Qualitative comments by the students, embedded librarian, faculty, and business practitioners also indicate improved learning resulted from course modifications.
Designing a Senior Capstone Course to Satisfy Industrial Customers
It is sometimes forgotten that industry is an important customer of engineering education. Ignoring this relationship has produced graduates that often fail to meet the changing needs of industry in todayis competitive environment. On the basis of feedback from our industrial customers, faculty from Mechanical Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering at Brigham Young University have jointly developed a new senior capstone design course entitled iIntegrated Product and Process Design.i This new capstone course is centered on industrial design and manufacturing projects. These projects involve both product and process design activities. Multidisciplinary teams of students are taught a structured development approach to produce typical industrial deliverables. These deliverables include a functional specification, product and process design, prototype, and first production sample. This paper identifies changing industrial needs, describes how the course was designed to meet these needs, and presents results from the initial offerings of the course.