Scalable Hands-On Engineering Experiences in Community Colleges
Abstract
Community colleges provide low-cost and high-quality opportunities to acquire the necessary skills to transfer to 4-year engineering colleges. Compared to 4-year institutions, the population served skews heavily towards underrepresented minorities, individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and students following non-traditional paths, such as veterans. This provides an opportunity for a broad pool of students to obtain skills that are vital for the nation’s workforce in general, and defense industries in particular. Unfortunately, for students interested in engineering, at many colleges there are few courses that provide hands-on skills. This disadvantages students who transfer, requiring them to make up the material at considerable cost in time and money, and worse, causes many to become discouraged by a curriculum heavy in math and science but lacking in the applications that drew them to engineering in the first place. Community colleges often have only a single instructor to cover all of engineering, and in many cases lack facilities for laboratories. To overcome these problems, we have developed a model electrical engineering curriculum in collaboration with a partner college that makes use of student-owned kits. This provides a capstone design experience that requires no specialized equipment at colleges and can yield the same increased level of engagement we have seen with similar courses at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). We propose 1) to scale hands-on engineering experiences to multiple partner colleges across many engineering disciplines 2) develop on-line versions of other required engineering courses to enable broad access within the community college system and support transfer students, 3) create a network of community college instructors who can provide mutual support to sustain engineering instruction, 4) develop chapters of student organizations to support student-led activities at partner institutions and 5) create a bridge program for students transferring to UCLA, including increased opportunities for internships. In this way, both curricular and extra-curricular design activities will be spread, with support networks to facilitate exchange of best practices and enable updating of course and activity content. The result will be increased retention of students in engineering programs, and reduced time to degree and thus educational costs for the students.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jul 26, 2018
- Source ID
- N000141812667
Entities
People
- Gregory Pottie
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy
- University of California, Los Angeles