Engineering education, apart from the medical sciences, has to be mostly focused on imparting practical and hands-on knowledge to the students. The curriculum design and the pedagogy followed should always keep the focus on effectively translating the knowledge gained through theory classes into the related lab experiments. This chapter dwells deeper into the curriculum design and pedagogy followed in conducting various theory courses along with the lab courses, in the field of electronics, embedded systems, and computer science (CS) at the Myanmar Institute of Information Technology (MIIT), Mandalay, Myanmar and also for the graduate level degree courses at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIITB). The authors bring out the student learning outcomes (SLOs) gained through different innovative and new ways of imparting knowledge by carefully designing and delivering lab exercises and also evaluating the students' learning through various evaluation components, such as assignments, projects, and experiments in the theory and lab examinations.
TopIntroduction
Teaching core engineering disciplines like Electronics and Computer Science (CS) involve imparting knowledge such that the students after completing the degree are equipped with full technological knowledge which is current and relevant, so that they are employable and productive when they get into the industry. Though all the engineering disciplines are evolving faster, Electronics and CS evolve at a much rapid pace which warrants that the curriculum and course contents are revised and enhanced at a regular interval to make sure that what students learn are always kept relevant and useful to the industry they get into. The companies working in these two domains are also very agile and are working on break-neck speed to be profitable and to stay afloat in the most competitive environment they are in.
Companies working on the cutting-edge technologies do not have time and luxury to train the students because of the Time To Market (TTM) pressures they are always in. These companies want the students to be trained in the areas they are working on so that these young hires become productive the day they get into the companies. Though most of the high-tech and product companies have the internship options for the period of 6 months to one year, still the gaps need to be short enough that the students have to be trained only on the company’s production environment and tools, and not on the core technologies they are working on.
The onus lies on the curriculum designers and teachers of the Higher Educational institutions (HEI) to structure the courses such that the companies hiring them would find the students employable and productive as soon as they come in. Though meeting all the expectations of these high-tech companies by the HEIs seems tough and impractical, with the careful thought process while designing the curriculum and by doing the yearly appraisal of the course contents, would surely make these insurmountable goals into a reality and easily achievable.
The following are some of the broader questions which need to be taken care of and also aptly addressed by the curriculum and course designers of both Electronics and CS domains of HEIs:
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Are the technological areas covered in the course relevant now?
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Does the course provide all the basic knowledge and skills for the students to be productive when they enter the industry?
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Does the course mislead the students about any absolute technologies as relevant and current?
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Are the students aware of the future directions of the technologies and equipped well enough to learn and ramp up on them over the time?
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Are the students motivated and trained on continuous learning to keep themselves abreast of their domains of interest?
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Are the students familiar and have enough hands-on experience through their lab courses to be productive from the day one in the industry?
The following sections in this chapter would dive deep into different courses in the Electronics and the CS domains to demonstrate how the above questions have been addressed by the careful design of pedagogy. It will also outline and elaborate on how the SLOs were measured by various evaluation components designed into various courses. Every sub-section below would try to explain and bring out the design methodologies in the most generic and sufficiently at a higher level such that the learnings from these can easily be taken and applied to various other domains without much of loss of generality and effectiveness.
TopWriting Student Learning Outcomes (Slos)
Let us first understand how to write effective SLOs (Are & Learning, 2002) (Education, n.d.) before looking at the specifics that we would like to elaborate in our current context of Electronics, Embedded Systems and CS. The SLOs are expected to be very specific and well-defined objectives that are realistic, measurable and that bring out the future skills that the students would exhibit and demonstrate clearly after the successful completion of the courses offered. The SLOs should also be defined at a much broader level bringing out the focus and goals of the curriculum of the entire program (CS or ECE) and not restricted or limited to a particular course or a topic of coverage in a course. The SLOs have to be simple, clear and unambiguous with a laser focus on the product of the learning, which are students, and not on the student’s process of learning.