Facilitating Learning and Teaching in a Common Core Course on Grand Challenges: A Blended Learning Approach

Eddie Ng

With the growing awareness of engineering grand challenges that we are facing in the 21st century, there is an increasing interest in developing new courses to nurture professionals for dealing with these challenges. Grand challenges are complex problems which often require multi-disciplinary knowledge. To prepare the next generation of professionals for the challenges, a common core course is designed to develop students’ abilities to identify relevant issues and explore engineering solutions collaboratively in solving these open-ended problems. As a common core course, students from different academic disciplines will be enrolled in the course and to work in teams to formulate solutions that address the challenges through making use of the diverse expertise from their disciplines of study. In the meantime, however, students from different disciplines naturally have different learning styles and levels of understanding on a challenge topic. To facilitate learning and teaching in this course, a blended learning approach is adopted. In addition to guest lectures, online learning resources, face-to-face teaching, and peer learning, a learning approach called structured controversy is also adopted to enable students to be engaged in interactive learning experiences. Furthermore, a peer learning model is applied to facilitate face-to-face teaching. Pre- and post-course surveys are conducted. The results of the course surveys are good resources to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach

Grand Challenge Tech+ Innovator Program of Sungkyunkwan University Hub Center

Sung-Jin Song

Engineering a Holistic Education

Mushtak Al-Atabi