MEERCat: A Case Study of How Faculty-led Research Initiatives Gave Rise to a Cross-departmental Research Center with Potential to Inform Local Policy

Abstract

is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He has his bachelors and masters in Electrical Engineering from India. He currently serves as the Chair-elect of the ASEE Student Division as has been an active member of the international engineering education community while serving as the President of Student Platform for Engineering Education Development (SPEED) and as the Vice-President of Student Engagement for the International Federation for Engineering Education Societies (IFEES). His research interests include education policy, faculty development in higher education, integration of technology and entrepreneurship in engineering education, and service learning.

Engineering student experience and self-direction in implementations of blended learning: a cross-institutional analysis

“…Freeform is a pedagogical system which has been iteratively developed, researched, and propagated through the joint effort of faculty in the Purdue University-West Lafayette (PUWL) Schools of Engineering Education (ENE) and Mechanical Engineering (ME). Originally conceived to enhance teaching and learning in 2nd year dynamics courses (Rhoads et al, 2014), the Freeform environment has since been applied to other courses in ME mechanics (Kandakatla et al, 2018) and other core engineering sciences (e.g., in Chemical Engineering). The environment was designed to combine best practices in blended learning (Halverson et al, 2014;Means et al, 2009) with active (Christie & de Graaff, 2017;Freeman et al, 2014) and collaborative (Barkley et al, 2014;Dillenbourg, 1999) instructional approaches, encouraging the adoption of innovative pedagogical methods and allowing students to engage with a wide variety of in-person and online learning resources (Rhoads et al, 2014).…”

“…Having these resources distributed to multiple implementing institutions provides a unique opportunity to study how and why students interact with specific subsets of resources and learning opportunities (Kandakatla et al, 2018). Previous work by Stites et al (2019), Stites et al (2020) used cluster analysis to identify nine distinct resource usage patterns among students.…”

“…For the past six years, our research team has been collecting data on the implementation of a blended learning environment called Freeform. The Freeform environment was developed to combine a variety of research-based pedagogical innovations and learning resources (Rhoads et al, 2014) and has been implemented at several engineering institutions-both domestically within the USA and internationally-since its formal introduction in 2014 (Kandakatla et al, 2018). One of the major affordances of blended learning is flexibility, allowing students to determine how best to tailor resource use to fit their individual needs (Means et al, 2009).…”

Bringing Research to Practice: Exploring Applications of Resource Usage Research in Undergraduate Mechanics Education

“…Five papers on resource usage are included in this synthesis, some of which are still under review at the time of writing. Since research started in 2015 33 , our team has collected a large dataset comprising transcript information, survey responses, video observations, and transcribed interviews from those students who consented to participate in this research. Four studies draw on data from the Freeform learning environment, while one comes from an analysis of department-level data.…”

“…Although it has been mentioned in previous work 33 , our first step to improve the experience in Freeform was incorporating an online application for collecting homework and providing rapid feedback to students. Interviewees frequently cited how the timing with which they received feedback affected how useful that feedback was for their studies.…”