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151-160 of 189 results

  • Encouraging Students to Pursue an Engineering Education and Career

    PI Massood Towhidnejad

    This NSF-sponsored project provides scholarship for engineering students pursuing degrees in computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and software engineering.

    Working closely with faculty and student mentors, scholarship recipients are involved in multi-disciplinary projects involving unmanned and autonomous systems throughout their four years of undergraduate study.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • From Middle School to Industry Vertical Integration to Inspire Interest in Computational Thinking

    PI Massood Towhidnejad

    CO-I Thomas Hilburn

    While students typically do not see immediate advantages of the topics being studies, top down integration exposes students to larger, more complex projects, giving them better appreciation for topics as they realize the “big picture.”

    Funded by the National Science Foundation, this research seeks to vertically integrate software development best practices from industry to graduate, undergraduate, high school, and middle school academic programs, with the intention of increasing student interest in computing and computational thinking.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Developing Artifact Peer Review Assignment Methodologies to Maximize the Value of Peer Review for Students

    PI Matthew Verleger

    This engineering education research project seeks to develop a proof-of-concept peer review matching algorithm and demonstrate if it is a valuable and viable methodology for conducting peer review. Peer review is a proven method that has positive impact on student learning. The project will test the algorithm on Model Eliciting Activities in the engineering classroom, and investigate how changing peer review can affect student learning.



    ​The broader significance and importance of this project is the transformative potential of improving peer review processes, since peer review is used throughout STEM and medical fields. Thus this preliminary investigation can extend outside the realm of improving student learning. This project overlaps with NSF's strategic goals of transforming the frontiers through preparation of an engineering workforce with new capabilities and expertise. Additionally NSF's goal of innovating for society is enabled by supporting the development of innovative learning systems.

    ​


    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Platform for Investigating Concept Networks on the Instrumentality of Knowledge (PICNIK)

    PI Matthew Verleger

    This engineering education research project seeks to develop a concept network for engineering and a platform for helping students identify how concepts are connected across a curriculum.  The goal is to better understand and improve how students value the concepts being taught throughout their education.



    By data mining course materials (i.e., textbooks, course notes, syllabi, video transcripts, websites, etc.), a concept network can be developed for that course. With each additional resource, the network connectedness become more fully representative.  By mapping materials from courses throughout a curriculum, and then overlaying the resulting map on a degree plan of study, students will be able to better identify and value how concepts being taught today are connected and used throughout the rest of their education. For instructors, curricular redesign becomes significantly easier, as they will be able to more fully contextualize how other courses depend on their material.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Bayesian Analysis of Stellar Evolution

    PI Theodore von Hippel

    Bayesian Analysis of Stellar Evolution is an international collaboration studying stellar evolution with an emphasis on stellar ages. We also develop and support a Bayesian software suite that recovers star cluster and stellar parameters from photometry, currently called BASE-9.

    BASE-9 is useful for analyzing single-age, single-metallicity star clusters, binaries, or single stars, and for simulating such systems. BASE9 uses Markov chain Monte Carlo to estimate the posterior probability distribution for the age, metallicity, distance modulus, and line-of-sight absorption for a cluster, and for the mass, binary mass ratio, and cluster membership probability for every cluster member.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Small UAS (sUAS) Mid-Air Collision (MAC) Likelihood

    PI Ryan Wallace

    CO-I Dothang Truong

    CO-I Scott Winter

    CO-I David Cross

    This research focuses on sUAS MAC likelihood analysis with general aviation (GA) and commercial aircraft. Because severity research varies based on where a collision occurred on a manned aircraft, this likelihood research will not only look at the probability of a MAC, but also the likelihood of colliding with different parts of a manned aircraft.

    Complete Mid-Air Collision (MAC) risk assessments require estimates of both collision severity and collision likelihood. This research focuses on sUAS MAC likelihood analysis with General Aviation (GA) and commercial aircraft. Because severity research varies based on where a collision occurred on a manned aircraft, this likelihood research will not only look at the probability of MAC but also the likelihood of colliding with different parts of a manned aircraft.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Best practices in teaching statistics and research methods within an aviation curriculum

    PI Robert Walton

    Student learning assessment is necessary at most universities, the question is whether or not student learning assessment though the use of tests can be turned into a less anxiety-provoking experience and, most ideally, into a summative learning experience for students. Using a three-test format student assessment this research examined an alternate testing paradigm, aiming directly at anxiety associated with tests and grades.



    This research will examine an alternate testing paradigm, aiming directly at anxiety associated with tests and grades. The research question for this study is whether or not student assessment though the use of a traditional testing format could be made less anxiety provoking and, most ideally, be turned into a teaching/learning experience for students. Students in a statistics course will be assessed using a three-test format. Tests will be scored immediately after completion, with the student present and incorrect responses explained. The student can then retake an alternate exam and will receive the highest grade on any version of the test they take. Data will be examined for statistically-significant indicators from version 1, to 2, to 3 of the examinations.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Research and update SSCP Study Guide to 3d Edition

    PI Michael Wills

    Research current cybersecurity industry best practices, threat intelligence, and regulatory requirements, as part of publisher update for (ISC)2 Systems Security Certified Professional Study Guide, 3d Edition

    Extensively revise the previous (2nd Edition) of this study guide to reflect cutting-edge best practices across the information security / cybersecurity market spaces. Research to support new content for operational technology (OT) security issues -- for IoT, process control, autonomous devices, smart buildings and vehicles, and even medical implants. Focus this on the security issues of IT-OT systems integrations, becoming far more commonplace in modern business in most industries. Adapt this to self-paced learning and ready reference format required in a study guide for individual and classroom use.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Experimental Academics in Action at ERAU (EAA-at-ERAU)

    PI Michael Wills

    EAA@ERAU: IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach that puts academic experimentation into action in ways that attract and engage both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.



    This project, inspired by my current activities as an Academic Innovation Research (AIR) Fellow, recognizes that it's all well and good to develop and trial innovative teaching, class design, or assessment techniques in a handful of classes; but it's quite another to get prospective students to come to ERAU, take such new and different courses, and have all benefit from the experiences.

    What's Needed: More of an experimental, "Skunk Works" life cycle approach to innovation in teaching.


    SUBMITTED as a proposal to the Academic Innovation 2023 Virtual Conference, Rothwell Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence.


    CONCEPT:

    Throughout the history of aviation, the "experimental mindset" has been the driving force behind the development of new approaches and ideas. Experimenters have transformed aviation time and time again.  Clearly, the vast majority of flights are anything but experimental; those flights have business needs to attend to, or mission objectives to accomplish.

    But that "test pilot" mindset, that experimenter view, is alive and well throughout the aviation and aerospace community across the world.   And the notion of going to an Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In event, like at Oshkosh, WI, excites every one of us.


    We at ERAU know this; it's in our blood.


    We just don't do this very well, if at all, with our classes or our teaching. Okay, yes, a few of us do innovate around the edges; we tweak approaches and try new tools and new techniques.


    Which none of our students ever find out BEFORE they walk into our classrooms, virtual or physical.


    IMAGINE an Experimental Academic Approach, that puts academic experimentation into action, in ways that attract the attention of both existing students AND prospective students, students who want to join us in blazing a new trail, finding a new way to look at a tried-and-true topic.


    An EAA strategy for Worldwide needs to gently touch many different aspects of many different business processes here at Worldwide; processes that must be rock-solid, well-oiled and well-scaled for our production, mainline course deliveries, term after term.


    As a concept exploration and demonstration, this project will build on the AIR Fellows Program's approach to having a small handful of innovative "pilot" courses ready to launch in the coming calendar year as context, feasibility study, and as the test case to show that an EAA strategy is necessary (but not sufficient) for such innovations to have a chance of success.


    Challenging many of the conventional wisdom factors about the "current" "best" ways of doing our business of course development, production, teaching, and assessment, by placing those within a messaging strategy that disrupts hearts and minds without requiring a full-scale disruption of existing business, marketing, outreach, enrollment, advising, course production, teaching, and assessment processes.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

  • Academic Innovation Research Fellowship Grant: Scaling Up the Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit

    PI Michael Wills

    Empirical evaluation of class design techniques that empower students to take creative, active, agile ownership of their learning, thus auto‐immunizing against accidental or deliberate academic integrity issues; scalable as a toolkit by other instructors in other disciplines across ERAU

    This project, funded by ERAU's AIR Fellowship Program, builds on several years of rapid prototyping and use of different innovative techniques, applied in different ways, in various courses that I have been teaching for ERAU over the past several years. Activity by activity, these flight tests of specific techniques illuminated the central concept of this project: that a better design approach for classroom activities, supported in agile ways by the instructor, can deliver four primary student-centric benefits:

    1. Liberate student creativity  -- turning them loose to creatively build their own problems, develop their own solutions, and test those solutions
    2. Concretely make the learning relevant to the students, grounded in reality
    3. Leading to increased feelings of empowerment by students, and of ownership of their own learning processes
    4. And have so much more fun while they’re doing it, that they simply have no incentive and many emotional disincentives to cheat, cut corners, or under-achieve

    Note the natural knock-on effect of these benefits on the faculty member: as students become more engaged with their learning, own their learning, and thereby reduce their potential for over-reliance on learning by copying (instead of critical reading for comprehension), they reduce the instructor’s time and effort spent chasing potential academic integrity violation (AIV) issues. As students have more fun doing better quality work, the instructor should be able to better enjoy the evaluation, feed-forward, and assessment aspects of their duties.

    These benefits amount to an inoculation or immunization of students that helps prevent them from committing academic integrity violations, for whatever reason; in doing so, this inoculation (or “creativity megavitamin treatment”) may also light fires under a student’s desires to create work that they want to be proud of, and can and should be proud of.

    The Academic Integrity Vaccine Toolkit (AIVT) refers to a set of design paradigms, frameworks, or models which encourage and support the development, deployment, and teaching of courses that target this goal.

    Project Plan

    This Project proposes to further develop these assertions so that they can be adopted and adapted by other faculty members into their own teaching and learning experiences. This will be accomplished by the following set of tasks:

    Task 1.Inventory, characterize, and assess early prototyping trials. I will go through classes I have taught during the last two years (approximate) in which I deployed and used one or more of the techniques I have been trialing in this regard. Characterization would, for example, attempt to identify whether a particular element was best suited for supporting foundational or prerequisite knowledge and skills development, guided inquiry, advanced concepts, or in other ways, as the data may suggest.  I will continue to enrich this data set from lessons learned from my ongoing teaching throughout the AY.

    Task 2.Identifying candidate “meta-models” of AIVT elements. This seeks to develop a consistent meta-description of such elements, to facilitate their development as containerized, redeployable courseware elements.

    Task 3.Focused, limited query and research as needed, when aspects of the project need greater support from either a theoretical or a practical perspective.

    Task 4.Curating and hosting the Project, its concepts, frameworks, paradigms, and the AIVT, in a fashion that facilitates sharing, collaboration, and use by other ERAU faculty members as and when appropriate.  Notionally, this would be in a newly-created Canvas course that I would build and use for this purpose.

    Expected Impacts.

    At the individual level, I see the project as making my own style of renovate-as-I-teach more scalable and sustainable. It will provide me with better mental models and concepts for how I go about my preparation for teaching each new class; its toolkits and elements should make my job of tuning, pruning, updating, or pivoting activities within each class I teach, each time I teach it, easier and more repeatable.

    The experience of this project will also give me greater insight as to whether these concepts, ideas, tactics, and techniques have subject domain – specific characteristics of note.

    Sharing these findings and experiences with the broader ERAU faculty and course design communities can lead to many benefits:

    • Improved student engagement leads to greater student success
    • Faculty engagement with students becomes more enjoyable as it becomes more supportive and effective
    • As courses become more agile, an academic discipline or degree program can be more agile and responsive in meeting rapidly-evolving real-world situations
    • All of which can enhance the University’s reputation, standing, effectiveness, and enrollments.

    And Then What?  Even a modest, partial success with some of the elements of this project can provide the seeds for a variety of subsequent projects and activities; all of which can (I posit) build on a better-informed baseline of insight derived from the experiences to date of teaching and learning using these or similar innovation tactics here at ERAU.

    Categories: Faculty-Staff

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