Category: News

A group of three faculty and staff members from Universidad del Norte (Uninorte) in Barranquilla, Colombia, came to visit Purdue between July 17th and 23rd. Their trip was part of a collaboration with Purdue’s College of Engineering, and particularly with the Mechanics Freeform Classroom instructional innovative platform. Freeform was born out of a national need to improve Engineering students’ outcomes, particularly in core disciplinary classes. The greatest challenges in engineering undergraduates’ performance lie in second and third year courses. Being aware of the situation, Purdue professors Chuck Krousgrill and Jeffrey Rhoads designed an innovative approach for both teachers and learners. By integrating Active learning structures, Blended learning models, and Collaborative learning opportunities (ABC), their team of researchers was able to significantly enhance achievement and retention in engineering undergraduates. Freeform Classroom is based on…

July 26, 2016 by Kevin Wilcox A team at Purdue University is researching the role that a collection of innovative education techniques known as the 'freeform classroom' has played in reducing by half the number of struggling students in a sophomore dynamics course and how scalable those techniques are to different academic institutions. The team is led by Jennifer DeBoer, Ph.D., an assistant professor of engineering education at Purdue. DeBoer joined the faculty at Purdue in 2014, just as Charles Krousgrill, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Rhoads, Ph.D., both professors of mechanical engineering, were publishing the promising results of early work with the freeform classroom, which integrates blogs, workbooks, and streamlined textbooks to better reach today's "digital native" students. The results are encouraging. In one dynamics course typically taken by sophomores in…

July 13, 2016 by Emil Venere New research aims to measure the effectiveness of a teaching approach that allows students in challenging engineering courses to access hundreds of instructional videos and animations while encouraging interaction with each other and faculty online. The system, called the Purdue Mechanics Freeform Classroom, might help answer a national call by the U.S. Council on Jobs and Competitiveness to increase the number of engineering graduates by 10,000 annually. "There is a need for more engineers in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality," said Jennifer DeBoer, an assistant professor of engineering education who is leading the research. "Graduates need to have the ability to collaborate and to be part of a cohesive and productive group." The Freeform Classroom could play a role in…

June 20, 2016 by Emil Venere New research aims to help educators quantify how the best students perform problem solving with the aid of instructional videos, a step toward learning how to better coach students in difficult engineering curricula. The research features a new experimental format that uses data from a system that tracks students' "eye gaze" with cameras, also documenting individual problem-solving methods with "smartpens" that record handwriting and audio. Unlike previous research, the new approach defines the order in which a student performs specific actions, which could be crucial to the success of problem-solving methods, said Edward Berger, a Purdue University associate professor of engineering education and mechanical engineering. Twenty-four students participated in the study. "We give them a problem to solve, and we record their actions as they engage…

June 9, 2014  by Emil Venere WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Purdue University researchers who developed a new approach to more effectively teach large numbers of engineering students are recommending that the approach be considered for adoption by universities globally. The system, called the Purdue Mechanics Freeform Classroom, allows students to interact with each other and faculty online while accessing hundreds of instructional videos and animations. It was pioneered by Charles Krousgrill, a professor of mechanical engineering, and has been used for more than two years in two mechanical engineering core courses with hundreds of students enrolled annually. "Data analysis shows that the students are really engaging our materials, and it is having a marked effect on student performance," said Krousgrill, who is working with Jeffrey Rhoads an associate professor of mechanical engineering; Eric Nauman,…