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Proceedings of the ASME 2015 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & ExpositionIMECE2015

November 13-19, 2015, Houston, Texas

IMECE2015-52672

LEVERAGE INNOVATIVE DESIGN THINKING TO DESIGN A TECHNOLOGY-ENHANCED INTERACTIVE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Ang Liu*Department of Aerospace and Mechanical

EngineeringUniversity of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA 90089-1453Email: [email protected]

James MorrisonDepartment of Industrial & Systems Engineering

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

291 Daehak-ro, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, KoreaEmail: [email protected]

Chu-Yi WangDepartment of Aerospace and Mechanical



Stephen C.-Y. LuDepartment of Aerospace and Mechanical



Wei WeiSchool of Mechanical Engineering and

AutomationBeihang University

No. 37, Xuayun Road, Beijing, China, 100191Email: [email protected]

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on the interplay of design methods,

learning technology, and global learning in the context of future engineering education. Specifically, it presents some of our best practices of employing a variety of different design methods to integrate a set of diverse learning technologies in order to enable a global engineering design class. First, we used the design methods, such as Axiomatic Design, to systemically transform the student voices into a set of functional requirements and a hierarchal structure of design parameters. Based on which, next, we integrated a variety of learning technologies to satisfy the FRs and to instantiate the DPs, towards a system solution of an interactive learning environment. Last but not least, new engineering courseware is developed and delivered in the global scale. A global design course, which is jointly offered by 5 global universities, is presented as an illustrative example to detail the above process.

1. INTRODUCTIONIn the 21st century, it is now widely recognized that

technology and globalization are the two driving forces of societal development in general and educational advancement in particular. Thomas Friedman used to say that the world became flat because of globalization [1], however, the world is never truly flat until education is flattened to become. Some traditional approaches like the distance education and its recent evolvement to Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) intend to address the issue of making the content knowledge availability and accessible to everyone regardless where they are [2-3], we argue that it is equally, if not more, important to engage individual learners in the collaborative construction of contextual understandings on global engineering subjects. It is for this reason we had developed a global education initiative, called iPodia <http://ipodia.usc.edu/>, to promote the “classroom-without-borders” engineering education paradigm. In higher education, unlike K-12, the curriculum is not predefined but is developed by scholars of their unique

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discipline, which in turn makes observations of pedagogical processes, practices and outcomes complex and the need to uncover the learning goals and views of students critical in understanding how and in what ways the course was designed to achieve the desired or anticipated goals. Thanks to the observant eyes of the educational experts, the process of how we had relied on our disciplinary knowledge of design theory and methodology to create a technology-enabled collaborative leaning environment for the global engineering class was well documented and systemically made visible.

The focus of this paper lies in the interplay of three important subjects in engineering education: design methodology, learning technology, and global class. To date, each subject has been separately explored in the context of engineering education. Nevertheless, few spotlight has been put on the overlapping area in between the three subjects. Specifically, a global engineering class and the technical platform upon which the class is made possible have rarely been treated and studied as a complex system from the design perspective. By dictionary definition, a system refers to an integrated whole formed by a set of interdependent components and their mutual relationships. Given that development of a global engineering class must concern numerous stakeholders, preferences, functional requirements, design parameters, process variables, dependency relationships, constraints, and uncertainties, not only the class can be and should be formulated as a system in theory, but also it is often proven to be a highly complex system in practice. To date, however, few efforts have been devoted to leverage the existing design theory and methodology to support the course development as a way to enhance the system’s robustness and to reduce its complexity. The above explains the primary motivation of this study.

Against such background, this paper presents our best practices of employing a set of different design methods to guide the synthesis of a variety of diverse learning technologies and tools (as means) towards an interactive learning environment (as ends). Based on which, a global engineering class was developed and situated in the new learning environment. Here we define an interactive learning environment as a technical system that is composed of a variety of advanced learning technologies/tools, upon which, different global classes can be developed to enable learners from different countries and on separate campuses to engage in the collaborative and interactive learning across physical, institutional, and cultural boundaries. Unlike the traditional distance education approach where learning technologies function to enlarge the delivery distance from one teacher to multiple learners, the proposed interactive learning space is intended to eliminate the interaction distance between global learners themselves. It should be made clear that, however advanced the interactive learning environment is developed, it is not the true end (i.e., ultimate goal) of our design, but rather it serves as a means to realize the global engineering classes, while there exist many other possible means to enable the global classes such as the more traditional solutions such as the study abroad programs and the student exchange programs. It should be noted that though, from the design perspective, a global engineering class consists of much more components

than the learning technologies and tools. But rather, for example, academic calendar, learning module, assignment, examination, team project can also be considered as the integral components of a global class. In specific to this paper, we choose to merely focus on the course components of learning technologies and tools. The above outlines the scope of this study.

This study is conducted based on a particular global engineering class jointly offered by five world learning universities in 2014 spring semester. The course focused on the subject of “principles and practices of global innovations”. The course has been consecutively offered for over five years with a steady increase of participating universities and student enrollment. It should be pointed out that, because 2014 spring was not the first time the course was offered, the design process that we describe next should be seen as the improvement of an existing design instead of the creation of a completely new system. This unique global innovation class was made possible by the iPodia Alliance <www.ipodialliance.org>, which is an independent, nonprofit, global education consortium. All member universities of the iPodia Alliance agreed to collaborate together strategically to develop new courseware and to deliver joint classes upon the technology-enabled interactive learning environment. To date, current memberships of the alliance include ten universities: University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, USA; Peking University (PKU) in Beijing, China; Tisinghua University in Beijing, China (THU); National Taiwan University (NTU) in Taipei, Taiwan; Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, South Korea; Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (TECHNION) in Haifa, Israel; RWTH Aachen University (AACHEN) in Aachen, Germany; India Institute of Technology (IIT) - Bombay in Mumbai, India; University of São Paulo (USP) in São Paulo, Brazil; Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, Goa, Hyderabad, India; and Qatar University (QU) in Doha, the State of Qatar.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 explains our unique research questions. Section 3 elaborates the early stage design process in regards to three phases: people involvement, functional design, and conceptual design. For each phase, not only we introduced the design methods that were used to guide the design decision making process, but also we provided some illustrative examples. Section 4 illustrates the final design outcome. Section 5 presents the evaluation of our design outcome via an anonymous student survey, and our lessons learned during the designing process. Section 6 draws conclusions and outlines future works.

2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Design is an essential activity that characterizes the human creativity in general and engineering profession in particular [4]. Design theory and methodology play the role of guiding the designers to carry out the design process systemically than arbitrarily and rationally than emotionally. To date, a number of different design theories and methods are developed to support different design stages and scenarios [5]. Some representing examples include but are not limited to General Design Theory [6], Systemic Design [7], Quality Function Deployment [8],


Axiomatic Design [9-10], Case Based Reasoning [11], and Design by Analogy [12], etc. According to CIRP’s classification [5] in light of the General Design Theory, various design theories and methods are classified into three categories depending on their usage: (1) to generate a new design solution (2) to enrich functional and attributive information of design solutions, and (3) to represent design knowledge. So far, however, few efforts have been devoted to leverage these theoretically sound and practically viable design methods to support the decision making of developing breakthrough educational systems, neither learning environment nor innovative courseware. On the other hand, although the importance of design education is increasingly recognized by the engineering education community with numerous resources invested to develop various capstone design course [13-15], there remains very few opportunities available, affordable, and accessible which enable students to learn how to collaboratively carry out design with their global peers. Furthermore, although technology enhanced learning has been widely studied in the past, to date, few efforts have been devoted to systemically investigate how and in what ways these readily available learning technologies can be integrated together to support the borderless global learning of engineering design, except for a few exceptions [16].

Figure 1. Outline of research questions

There are three specific research questions to be addressed through section 3-5, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The three questions each concerns with the design’s purposefulness, functionality, and evaluation.

Q1: How and in what ways certain design methods can be used to support the early stage decision making of designing a new interactive learning experiment for a global engineering class.

Q2: What kind of learning technologies are needed for a global engineering class, and how to synthesize them together to become a functional system solution?

Q3: To what degrees students are satisfied with the proposed interactive learning environment and the global engineering class.

3. DESCRIPTION OF DESIGN PROCESS

3.1 Stakeholder Involvement

A systemic design process always begins with involving the right stakeholders. In that regard, developing a new interactive learning environment for a global class involves more stakeholders than renovating an existing classroom for a local class, as the former process requires more resources, is limited by more constraints, and undertakes more uncertainties. Not even to mention that, the same decision making process must concurrently ocure on multiple universities and campuses at the same time, as a result, the actual number of stakeholders to involve must be multiplied, if not more, by the quantity of campuses participating in the course. From the design perspective, the more campuses are included, the more complexities arise, and the less robust the system is likely to become. Below are a list of stakeholders that were involved in our design decision making process: Development stakeholders: administrators, registrars, staff,

etc. Deployment stakeholders: engineers, camera operator, etc. Instructional stakeholders: teachers, teaching assistance, Result stakeholders: teacher, student, etc. External stakeholders: society, department, university, etc.

There were three key designers (i.e., the authors of Liu, Lu, and Morrison) who played leading roles through the whole design decision making process. Meanwhile, all three course designers are also course instructors: Lu was the lead instructor who gave weekly lectures; Liu was responsible for guiding the team design project; and Morrision led the cross-cultural exercise. All three instructors/designers specialize in design theory and methodology, with abundant publications in design reasoning, design cognition, and design method [17-19]. Additionally, some educational experts also contributed to the design decision making process by continuously providing insight and guidance, with respect to, for example, the references of student voices, the challenges of global education, the methods and rubrics of assessment, etc. In other words, from the ethnographic perspective, the course design process itself can also be regarded as an evolving development of continuous interdisciplinary dialogues [20].

In design, a key question is to identify who are the real customers to satisfy. Depending on the different answers to this question, the final design outcome could vary significantly. Strictly speaking, students are not the only “customers” of a global engineering class, but rather there are many other “customers” whose demands must be properly addressed as well, for instance, the administrator’s desire to increase their institution’s global presence, the junior instructor’s demand to receive a good course evaluation, etc. Worse yet, even for the primary “customers” of students, they come from diverse disciplinary, national, cultural backgrounds. Just like customers in different markets have different preferences over the same technical product (e.g., a smartphone or a tablet), students on different campuses also have different demands over the same educational product (e.g., a global design course). Based on our past experience, on one hand, there exists no significant difference in terms of students’ specific objectives of signing up a global engineering class and their challenges of learning in a


different environment than a traditional local course. On the other hand, student’s ranking of preference over the same set of objectives and challenges varied significantly in differently campuses. For example, the top three mostly mentioned student’s objectives of signing up this course are: (a) gain a better understanding of global innovation; (b) gain a cross-cultural learning experience; (c) expand my global social network. However, it was observed that students from different universities (and thereby countries and cultures) tended to rank them very differently. From design’s perspective, the importance of involving customers to participate in the decision making during early design phases has long been recognized. For example, there were extensive studies of the subject of customer involvement from the design perspective [21]. In general, customer involvements can be classified into three categories: design for customer, design with customer, and design by customer. We choose the strategy of design with customers. Specifically, at the conclusion of every year’s class, the teaching team will identify a “lead user” from each participating campus and promote him/her to be the course coordinator or TA of the next year’s class, so that his/her knowledge/experience can be transferred.

2.2 Functional Design

Functional design is an early design phase where those vogue customer voices are transformed into some concrete functional requirements of the product or service. We had followed the Quality Function Deployment to carry out the functional design. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a design method to systemically transform the qualitative parameters (e.g., customer demands) into quantitative parameters (i.e., functional requirements) in order to deploy the functions towards higher quality. In the past, QFD has been widely used to support the design of technical systems in the sake of better quality control. Although the method was also used to support the design of certain intangible services beyond physical products, to our best knowledge, there was no previous efforts that used QFD to design an educational system, not even to mention a global design course. The QFD method guides the designer to transform the input of customer voices into the output of engineer voices via a systemic process of 5 steps.

The input of student voices or (i.e., customer needs in design language) were collected from three channels: recruitment interview before the class, student feedback in the middle of the class, and learning assessment after the class. Above all, before a class was formed, we conducted a careful participant interview/selection process upfront. On average, the designers spent 15-20 minutes on interviewing each candidate who emerged out of a strict resume screening process. Next, as the class proceeds, students are encouraged to continuously provide their feedback through the semester, by means of open question/comments in class, anonymous posts on discussion board, private emails to TA, in-person meetings with the teacher, etc. All such feedback were eventually directed to the three key designers to make the final decisions. Last but not least, at the conclusion of the class, a learning assessment was conducted in the format of an anonymous online survey, which was composed of a set of multi-choice and open-ended

questions. The questions in the survey focused on soliciting student’s overall satisfaction of the class, understanding of lecture content, and advices to future student, etc.

The proposed course has been consecutively offered for over 5 years, we thereby have accumulated sufficient customer voices. The educational experts helped us to match these specific and detailed student voices we collected from our course to some general challenges for engineering education identified by, for example, the National Academy of Engineering, the ASEE. These general challenges enabled us to reflect, refine our course design in a larger context of the societal needs for better global engineering courses.

Based on the student voices collected from the above three channels, the upper level FRs of the course were determined by the designers to be as follows. The designers followed three basic principles to propose the functional requirements: complete, minimal, and independent. This is to say that, all reasonable student voices were equally considered and independently addressed with no redundancy. FR1: connect classrooms for joint lectures FR2: connect students for after-class team projects FR3: connect individual students for in-class exercises FR4: connect students out of the classroom

3.3. Conceptual Design

Conceptual design is the design phase where intangible functional requirements are transformed to more tangible design parameters under constraints. Conceptual design consists of both concept generation and concept selection. Specifically, the three designers followed the Analysis-Synthesis-Alternation method to generate multiple concepts, and the two axioms prescribed by the Axiomatic Design to select the best concept, respectively.

Analysis Synthesis Alternation is a new concept generation method developed by the authors of Liu and Lu based on their past studies of design cognition and reasoning [22]. ASA treats concept generation as a proposition-making process and adapts the formal definitions of analytic and synthetic propositions in logic to generate new concepts via systemic alternations of analysis and synthesis. The method is features with a coevolution of problem and solution domains, a systemic alternation of synthesis and analysis, and a progressive zigzagging across adjacent abstraction layers.

Axiomatic Design is a system design method developed by Suh to support creative design. The method gained its name largely because of the two design axioms prescribed by Suh to guide the analysis and comparison of different design concepts. Specifically, the independence axiom guides the designer to maintain the independence of functional requirements, whereas the information axiom guides the designer to minimize a concept’s information content. The combined consideration of both axioms leads to a both functional simply and physically certain concept.

Last but not least, conceptual design is the phase where constraints from downstream must be taken into consideration of the design decisions. By definition, constraint means an element factor that restricts a system from achieving a potentially higher goal. In their past studies, the authors of Lu


and Liu classified various design constraints into four categories: internal input constraint, external input constraint, internal system constraint, and external system constraints. Each category of design constraints can find its instantiations in the process of developing a global engineering course. Here we only provide some illustrative examples. Budget is a representing example of the external input constraint, which is neither a part of the system nor is chosen by the designers. For example, although TelePresence technology will provides students with a much more immersive experience, we eventually selected the more traditional videoconferencing technology, as the former goes over the budget most participating universities afford. Internet bandwidth is another example of the external input constraint, which limits the release of many learning tools’ full capability, for example the HD video capability of web conferencing, in certain

4. ILLUSTRATION OF DESIGN OUTCOME

This section presents our final design outcome of the interactive learning environment, which is an integrated system composed of a variety of learning technologies.

4.1 Learning Technology inside Classroom

We define an interactive classroom as a physical classroom that is equipped with necessary technical capability (e.g., multimedia, videoconferencing, etc.) to communicate with another compatible interactive classroom located remotely. Multiple interactive classrooms are linked together to provide a foundation and precondition for global engineering classes. In the interested of cost, a qualitied interactive classroom can be created by means of either upgrading a distance classroom by adding the necessary videoconferencing codecs or renovating a videoconferencing room by adjusting the room layout. For example, the USC classroom was upgraded from an existing distance classroom managed by its well established distance education network program, while both PKU and BITS classrooms were resulted from modifying readily available conferencing rooms. A typical interactive classroom is often equipped with an adjacent control room for camera operators and engineers to monitor the class activities and connection status in real time.

The multipoint videoconferencing technology, based on free Internet, is chosen to bridge multiple interactive classrooms located on different campuses. Strictly speaking, using videoconferencing to connect multiple geographically distributed classrooms is not a completely new approach, and there exist abundant studies and discussions on the advantages (e.g., reduction of cost and increase of productivity) and disadvantages (i.e., student’s lack of sense of cohortness) of this approach. In recent years, there emerged growing attempts of using the web-conferencing tool to connect remote classrooms [23-24]. Compared to videoconferencing, based on our long term trial and error, web conferencing is much more vulnerable to a number of uncertainties such as Internet bandwidth. On the other hand, telepresence is a recent advancement of videoconferencing. By definition, the notion of telepresence means a set of technologies which allow remote users located

in different places to feel as if they were present at the same location. Compared to the videoconferencing technology, on one hand, telepresence features a more immersive experience; on the other hand, however, it also concerns with a much higher installation and maintenance cost with respect to items such as lightning, air conditioning, display, furniture, and dedicated bandwidth. In other words, the design constraint of budget hinders us from incorporating the better performance telepresence in our final solution. Last but not least, since not all classrooms were equipped with the multipoint videoconferencing codecs, the multipoint control (MCU) unit is used to bridge multiple videoconferencing connections.

By definition, microphone refers to the technical means to pick up sounds in one classroom and to convert them into electrical signals which can be transited to another classroom via the videoconferencing codec. Generally speaking, at least two types of microphones are needed inside an interactive classroom: wireless tie-clip microphones for the teacher to lecture, and handheld microphones for the students to raise question or make comments. For the latter, because it consumes unnecessary time to pass the handheld microphone from one person to another, we also tried its alternative of table microphone and ceiling microphone. However, one disadvantage of the table/ceiling microphone is that it also automatically picks up any background noises, such as student taking notes, inside the classroom.

A typical interactive classroom must be equipped with at least two cameras: one rear camera to capture the teacher, and one audience camera to capture the students. Since only one video stream can be transmitted in videoconferencing, dedicated camera operators are needed to manually switch between the two cameras depending on who is speaking, teacher or student. In addition, the camera operator needs to actively track the speaking person and zoom-in and zoom-out the cameras accordingly. Some interactive classrooms are equipped with dynamic target tracking system which automatically zooms in the speaking person. All our classrooms are equipped with HD cameras, although the Internet bandwidth often limits the actual HD performance.

With respect to the display system, most classrooms are equipped with separate project screens and some classrooms are equipped with integrated video walls. For the former, at least three projector screens are necessary: the left screen to display the remote classroom A, the middle screen to display the shared lecture slides, and the right screen to display the remote classroom B or self-view of the local classroom. Besides, a rear display must be placed in the back of the classroom to enable the teacher to watch activities (e.g., students raising hands) occurring in remote classrooms in real time.


Figure 2. Illustration of an existing classroom on USC campus

4.2 Learning Technology outside Classroom

Originally, learning management system (LMS) was developed to document, store, manage, and deliver digital format of various course content. Recently, as growing functions are incorporated into LMS, such as discussion board, test, survey, wiki, grading, there is a trend that LMS is evolving towards a hub of student’s eLearning. Our final solution merely used the original and most basic function of LMS to post course documents (i.e., syllabus, textbook, notes, slides, etc.) and lecture recoding. Out choice of LMS is the existing Blackboard System operated by the distance education network program at USC. It is interesting to note that, recently, there also emerged a few attempts to transform the social networking site (e.g., Facebook) to become a LMS. Moreover, this idea was also advocated by some former students. We considered such an option but abandoned it mainly because it failed to comply with the Independence Axiom, which explicitly forbids using one single technology/tool (e.g., social networking site) to affect more than one functional requirements (e.g., to socialize and to review course content).

Discussion board allows its users to have conversations in the form of posted messages. The application of discussion board in education has been extensively reported by many previous studies. It is proven to be an important means of asynchronous interactions between teacher and students as well as among students themselves. Before 2014, we had used the discussion board tool of the Blackboard Platform to support this class from 2009 to 2013. Since 2014, we decided to switch to the Piazza Platform in light of former student’s suggestions, as well as to comply with the Independence Axiom by uncoupling discussion board from LMS. Compared to many traditional forum tools, Piazza features with a redesigned wiki-style Q&A process and a cleaner organization of different posts. Moreover, in contrast to the static class websites, Piazza displays updates in real time, hence, it somehow transforms the interactions from asynchronous to synchronous.

Web conferencing refers to the Internet-based tool that allows various conferencing activities (e.g., meeting, discussion, presentation, etc.) to simultaneously happen in

multiple locations. The common functions of a typical web conferencing tool include: desktop sharing, whiteboard sharing, file sharing, video streaming, audio, communication, text chat, poll/survey, meeting recording, etc. In our design, the web conferencing tool is used to satisfy three independent functional requirements: (1) to share lecture/presentation slides inside the classroom; (2) to enable group discussions inside the classroom; (3) to support team collaborations outside the classroom. There exist many web conferencing tools in the open market. The tools that we considered and compared include Skype, Adobe Connect, WebEx, BlueJeans, QQ, Google Hangout, etc. According to the Independent Axiom prescribed by the Axiomatic Design, we selected different web conferencing tools to satisfy the three functional requirements independently. First, we use the WebEx to broadcast the live lectures to individual students who cannot attend the lecture in their interactive classrooms, for example, duet to local holiday. In addition, WebEx also plays the role of sharing lecture/presentation slides in between multiple interactive classrooms. Next, we use the Blue Jeans to support the group exercises inside the classroom. In parallel to the teacher’s lecturing, all students are strongly encouraged (almost required) to bring their laptops (or tablets) to the classroom, to login different Blue Jean conferences, and to interact with their group members in real time. Last but not least, the globally distributed project teams formed upon the class use the Skype or Google Hangout to hold virtual team meetings. In general, more teams chosen Skype over Google Hangout in this regard, as the latter fails to provide the recording function, which is suggested by the students to be an important feature that allows them to review the team meetings afterwards. Furthermore, due to the Internet censorship policy in China and Google’s business decision to quit the Chinese market, the reliability of Google product/service was also a concern.

Email remains to be the primary means of communications between different stakeholders in a global class. A great majority of students chosen the email service provided their home institution to be their primary email, and Gmail is the first choice of their alternative email address. In general, the email communications occurring in a global class can be classified into three categories: teacher↔teacher, teacher↔student, and student↔student. For example, the teachers exchanged emails to jointly make decisions regarding, for instance, course structure, requirement, content, assignment, grading, etc.; the teachers email the students to make announcement and to give assignment, while the students email the teachers to report learning difficulties and to raise questions; and students email each other to discuss team assignment and to organize team meeting. In a global class, it is interesting to notice that student’s preference of using emails varied significantly on different campuses. Based on our observation, for example, it appears that Asian students tend to check their emails much less frequently than American students.

Mobile messenger means the communication-by-message service operated on mobile devices. A typical mobile messenger provides the functions such as text message, voice message, and location sharing, etc. As potential of mobile learning is drawing growing attentions recently [25], mobile messenger is


a cost-effective means to make possible the mobile learning upon a global class. It has been indicated by a number of past studies that social interaction plays a positive role in enhancing the team effectiveness of virtual teams. This is especially true for the globally distributed teams, which concerns with a higher level of difficulty to break the social barriers among team members. Moreover, through our past study, we found that mobile messenger was also commonly used by student teams to facilitate collaborative interactions with respect to, for example, meeting coordination which is often reflected by former students to be one of the biggest challenges within a global class. We considered different options of mobile messengers available on the open market such as WeChat, WhatsApp, KakaoTalk, Fackbook Messenger, etc. Our final choice was the WeChat messenger. It should be noted that though, in comparison with the social networking sites, there yet lacks of a dominating mobile massager on the global scale.

Beyond the academic interactions occurring inside the classroom, we further leverage the social networking service to promote social interactions outside the classroom, because “expand global social network” is cited to be an important demand most students have for a global engineering class [40-42]. Facebook is selected as our choice of social networking site, as it is commonly believed to be the dominating service provider at global scale. The only exception is PKU, where student’s access to Facebook is limited by Internet Censorship policy in China. To overcome this limitation of Chinese student’s learning opportunity, every PKU student was provided an individual virtual private network (VPN) account for them to access Facebook.

It is important to point out that, for each learning tool, a specific use guidance was created and provided to the class participants. The guidance specifies the process of how to use the tool to support a certain learning activity, and it also provides answers to a few common question. In addition, a course website was created to summarize the links to access different tools and to post their use guidance. Figure shows a timeline of how a typical student uses different tools to support his/her learning in the global engineering class.

5. EVALUATION OF USER SATISFICATION

This section presents evaluation of our design outcome. An anonymous survey was conducted to solicit participant’s satisfaction with both the interactive learning environment and the global innovation class situated in the environment.

5.1 Participants

The course has been consecutively offered for 6 years since 2009, the evaluation results presented in this section are collected from the most recent 2014 spring class, when course participants came from five member universities of the iPodia Alliance: USC, TECHNION, BITS, PKU, and KAIST. Because there were two BITS campuses (i.e., Hyderabad and Goa campus) participating, in total, the class links interactive classrooms on six campuses of five universities. The class was divided into two lecture sessions (i.e., session A and session B) as a way to accommodate the wide time difference on multiple locations, as there was no logistically possible time slot to connect all six classrooms simultaneously. Both sessions were lectured exactly the same content by the same instructor (i.e. the author of Lu). In the interest of quality control, the class size was intentionally limited to be 16 students on each campus, except at USC where 32 students were recruited in order to make possible the two sessions (i.e., 16 in each session).

Besides the national and cultural diversity that is born with a global class, our class was also characterized by a high diversity of its participating students’ disciplinary backgrounds. This is in sharp contrast with a local engineering class where its participants often come from the same department or program with highly identical disciplinary backgrounds. For example, the PKU class included only three engineering students, while the rest of students came from a variety of different disciplines of science (e.g., bioscience, chemistry, earth physics, etc.) and humanities (e.g., history, law, international politics, etc.); 25% of the USC class were not engineering (i.e., business) students, and the rest came from all kinds of engineering disciplines such as mechanical engineering, civil engineering, biomedical engineering, computer science, etc.

5.2 Lecture Content and Team Project

The chief instructor (i.e., the author of Lu) delivered 6 lectures to explain how to carry out functional and conceptual design using the relevant design methods (e.g., customer involvement models, Quality Function Deployment, Analysis Synthesis Alternation, Axiomatic Design, etc.) mentioned in Section 3, followed by another 4 lectures to guide the class to practice these methods through solving a real-world design problem – to design a technical product/service that prevents a bicycle from being stolen on campus.

A semester long team design project was assigned for students to practice the design methods that they learned in


class to solve real-world design problems. This is essentially an application of the project-based learning in the global scale. In that regard, it has been indicated by a number of past studies that project based learning is an effective approach to teach the domain-independent subject of “design thinking”. The 112 course participants (regardless their different class sessions) were equally assembled into 16 project teams, each has 7 members (i.e., 2 American, 2 Indian, 1 Chinese, 1 Korean, and 1 Israeli student). These teams were tasked to design “a collaborative space on campus to support small team collaborations”. The project had 4 major milestones: an icebreaker assignment, a functional design assignment, a conceptual design assignment, and a final review presentation. Above all, the icebreaker assignment asked each team member to propose 2-3 products that he/she believes that his/her peer teammates with different cultural backgrounds would be unable to tell the product’s associated customer needs. Second, the functional design assignment required all teams to follow the QFD method to systemically build a House of Quality for the given problem. Next, the conceptual design assignment asked every team to employ the ASA method to systemically generate a set of design concepts, and to use the Independent and Information Axioms prescribed by Axiomatic Design to rationally select the functional simple and physical certain one as their final design outcome. Finally, each team was given 15 minutes in class to present their design process and outcome.

5.3 Course Evaluation

At the conclusion of the course, all participants were tasked to fill in two online course surveys: a peer evaluation survey intended to evaluate each individual’s participation in and contribution to their team project, and a learning assessment survey intended to solicit student’s satisfaction with their learning experience in this global class. Since results of the former survey is not directly related to the questions of this study, we merely present results of the latter survey. The survey includes six portions, aiming to comprehensively assess different aspects of a student’s personalized learning experience. Each portion is composed of a set of multi-choice and open-ended questions. It was made clear that this is an anonymous survey intended to improve the future course design, and its results will not be used for any grading purpose. With respect to the completion rate, 60/112 students completed the learning assessment survey. Figure 4 shows composition of respondents with respect to their participating universities and academic disciplines. In comparison to the class statistics (see Table), it is evident that such a composition fairly matched that of the class. Given the scope of this paper (i.e., the interplay between design method, learning technology, and global class), we will selectively present some aggregated results of potion (1) and potion (5), although there were some interesting findings in other portions of the survey as well.

Figure 4. Percentage of response rate

4.4. Evaluation ResultFigure 5 indicates student’s stratification with the

interactive learning environment as a whole, and their satisfaction with each specific learning technologies and tools.

Figure 6 A-D indicates “student’s overall satisfaction of the class”, “to what degree their objectives were realized”, “whether they would recommend this course to others”, and “to what degree they desire more similar global courses on different engineering subjects”. These measures together reflected student’s overall satisfaction of the global engineering class developed upon the interactive learning space.

Figure 7 shows the result of “to what extent the course deepened the student’s understanding of ‘design thinking’”. And Figure shows how students rated the difficulty of the course content (i.e., the various design methods) and assignment (i.e., the team design project). It should be noted that, both questions were surveyed to the engineering and none-engineering students separately, since it is reasonable to hypothesize that the two groups of students might provide different answers to the same questions, which is further validated by the accumulated results.


Figure 5. Student’s satisfaction with interactive learning space

Figure 6. Student’s satisfaction with the global course

Figure 7. Student’s satisfaction with the global course

5.6 Discussions

Although student’s satisfactions with the separate learning technologies and tools are relatively low, their overall satisfaction with the integrated interactive learning environment is relatively high. This implies that different technologies/tools played complementary roles in supporting student’s different learning needs. On the other hand, a number of students reflected that they felt “overwhelmed” by the quantity and types of technologies they need to learn in order to succeed in this global class. Because we relied on the Independence Axiom from Axiomatic Design to guide our conceptual design, we proposed a separate, if not different, tool to satisfy each functional requirement. For example, we suggested three different web conferencing tools to support different kinds of synchronous learning activities (i.e., share lecture slides, enable in-class interactions, enable after-class collaborations). By doing so, the advantage is that the system’s robustness is improved – even if one tool somehow failed, it will not affect student’s another learning activity, while the disadvantage is that the number of tools to be mastered by students was significantly increased. Another interesting observation is regarding student’s learning curve over the technologies/tools in the new environment. Initially, we naturally presumed that student’s learning curve develops in an exponential growth pattern, where proficiency continuously increases over time without limit. However, it turned out to be actually unrealistic. As a matter of fact, a typical student tends to quickly stop learning a new technology after 2-3 unsuccessful attempts.

With respect to the specific tools, in particular, student’s satisfaction with the two most heavily used tools, videoconferencing for synchronous interactions in the classroom (39% “satisfied” and 20% “very satisfied”) and Piazza for asynchronous interactions outside the classroom (i.e., 51% “satisfied” and 18% “very satisfied”), are beyond our expectations. Within the class duration of 12 weeks, there were 13,394 total contributions on the Piazza. On average, that is roughly 10 contributions per person per week. In terms of video conferencing, overall, the technology’s performance was reasonably consistent and reliable. However, there remains situations where connections between interactive classrooms


were cut off due to bandwidth or operation issues. According to our count, on overage, the disconnection occurred at the frequency of 1.1-1.3 times per one hour lecture, and every disconnection requires at least 1:30 minutes, if not longer, to establish the reconnection. The worst disconnection, caused by a university wide loss of Internet at USC campus, lasted over 20 minutes. In contrast, student’s satisfaction with the web conferencing tool is below our expectation. Inside the classroom, due to limitation of Internet bandwidth and echoes caused by adjacent computers, most study groups were only able to perform text chat instead of video chat. Outside the classroom, the web conferencing tool failed to fully the virtual team collaborations on their design projects. According to the 16 teams, the top two challenges with respect to teamwork is “scheduling meetings at convenient times for all students” and “slow and irregular internet connectivity”. As a result, many teams “spent tremendous time deciding what application is most productive for every team member” and “ended up utilizing chat instead of audio/video because it was much more reliable”.

On the other hand, it should be noted that there exists an obvious gap between student’s satisfaction with the interactive learning environment and that with the global engineering class delivered in the environment. Specifically, the former is significantly lower than the latter. In other words, although students were less satisfied with the technical means, it does not affect their satisfaction with the global course enabled by the technical means. This is evident by the fact that 39% and 47% of respondents would “likely to recommend” and “recommend with enthusiasm” this course to their friends, and the “degree to which students desire more such global courses delivered upon the same platform” averages to be 4.20 on a scale of 1-5. With respect to the course subjects, a great majority of the class believed that the course greatly deepened their understanding of “global innovation” (i.e., average = 3.93) and “design thinking” (i.e., average = 4.14) on a scale of 1-5. Besides, it is interesting to note that there exists a significant difference between engineering and none-engineering student’s interpretation of the content difficulty. Such result somehow overturns our initial assumption that since the design methods (i.e., Quality Function Deployment, Analysis and Synthesis Alternative, and Axiomatic Design) being taught in this class are all domain independent ones, therefore, students from all disciplines should have no difficulty of understanding them. As a matter of fact, none-engineering students perceived a significantly higher difficulty to understand and to practice the methods than engineering students, according to the ANOVA result (i.e., F=).

With respect to team project assignment, 75% of respondents (52% “agreed” and 23% “strongly agreed”) concurred that “they effectively practiced the design methods taught in class through this team project assignment”. It should be noted that though, some students considered the “collaborative learning space” not to be a suitable design problem for the globally distributed teams because “it was an expansive and unclear project”, “there were not many innovative ideas in it”, “it was not intellectually challenging enough”, etc. In comparison to the task-work itself, it seems that students took away more from this course regarding how to collaborate being situated in the multicultural virtual teams. For

example, more than 50% of respondents “strongly agree” that “it made me realize the challenges of working within a globally distributed teams through this team project assignment”. Many teams mentioned that these first-hand experience of practical challenges further inspired them to accomplish their designs.

6. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORKS

The focus of this paper hinges on the overlapping area between design method, learning technology, and global learning in the large context of engineering education. Specifically, we presented our best practices of employing a set of design methods to integrate a variety of learning technologies in order to enable a global design class. The study included two specific objectives. On one hand, we intend to make a sound argument that a global engineering class and the technical platform (interactive learning environment) upon which the course is made possible of can be and should be regarded as a highly complex system, and some existing design methods may be leveraged to design or redesign the system in a more structured manner. This objective is realized by reflecting our design process with respect to the design methods that we applied to support our decision making. On the other hand, we intend to prove that technology makes it possible for today’s colleague students to obtain a reasonably effective global learning experience, being immersed in the interactive learning environment that we developed. The evaluation results clearly indicate that, overall, the class participants were satisfied with the interactive learning space and their global learning experience. It should be pointed out that, the unique contributions of this paper lies in that not only we presented our best practices of developing a global engineering class, but also we make visible some generic design principles behind our decision making process. As a result, interested readers can make use our results and findings in two directions. On one hand, the proposed technical platform can be directly used to enable future global classes in other engineering subjects such as sustainability, safety, etc. On the other hand, more design methods can be applied to make the system more robust and less complex.

Our future works hinge on two major directions. On one hand, it seems to be a promising attempt to employ the domain-independent engineering design methods to guide the design of. Not only these methods can be used to design an interactive leaning space, but also they can be to structure other none technical components of the course such as lectures, assignment, examination, etc. Our long term goal is to develop a comprehensive course design framework that is based on the exiting design methods but is tailored to the characteristics of engineering courses. For example, one of our subsequent projects is to use the complexity theories in design studies to diagnose and eliminate course complexities caused due to bad design decisions. On the other hand, we aim to incorporate more emerging learning technologies, such as virtual laboratory, learning games, to be a part of the interactive learning space for a global class. Together, these future works will lead to deeper understanding and practice of how a global engineering course should be better designed and how it can be better implemented.


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