A "Bottom-Up" Approach to Interdisciplinary Engineering Education in Nanotechnology

San Jose State University Foundation, San Jose CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project is addressing a contemporary need for modernizing engineering curricula, by developing effective methods of designing and implementing educational content for highly interdisciplinary subjects, nanotechnology in particular. It is a planning effort for piloting a "bottom-up" approach to interdisciplinary teaching and learning in this field. Nanotechnology requires very broad knowledge of all basic sciences and many different engineering disciplines, yet its deeper substance requires focused expertise in highly specialized topics. Therefore, the essence of this strategy is to enable subject-specific experts to develop subject-specific content using a bottom-up approach. The bottom-up approach will be balanced by a complementary "top-down" framework that reaches across a broad organizational level to provide structure and consistency. In the case of this planning effort, the organizational level is the College of Engineering at San Jose State University. The deliverable outcomes will be manifested as (1) enhanced content modules in three existing courses from three different engineering departments, (2) a flexible online library of short learning modules that share a common online delivery structure, and (3) a college-wide presentation of the modules to incorporate faculty feedback as well as promote sustained growth. This pilot work also provides valuable planning knowledge for broader implementation of this bottom-up approach, wherein the fundamental concepts could be extended to include Colleges of Science and/or Applied Sciences & Arts, for example. The intellectual merit is two-fold. A first merit is to create a means of developing the richest and most appropriate technical content for engineering students, by leveraging the specialized knowledge of subject experts. This brings emerging and contemporary knowledge of nanotechnology into the student learning environment. The other primary merit is to create a model for multidisciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration at a level that is higher than individual instructors leading individual classes. Structuring short learning modules into online tools furthermore contributes consistency, flexibility, and sustainability. The broader impact of this effort would be to enable widespread adoption of this model for bottom-up content development and peer-to-peer faculty learning. This has potential impact not only for nanotechnology but for any interdisciplinary academic subject. It is particularly well-suited for keeping pace with other rapidly-evolving areas such as bioinformatics. Our bottom-up approach is also a way of building content sophistication especially in university environments that may have no comprehensive "nanotechnology experts" per se. Having faculty work together to create and develop bottom-up pieces from their related specialized fields, however, provides a peer-enriched mechanism for providing and propagating modern knowledge.