KEENzine5

36 D oes the idea of implementing entrepreneurial- ly minded learning (EML) into your class com- pletely overwhelm you? Do you immediately think of semester-long projects and a massive overhaul of all your course materials? While EML can mean those things, sometimes an existing assignment can be modified in small ways that lead to big results. We are fortunate to be part of a department and college that values EML. About one-third of the faculty in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department have attended Villanova’s KEEN Deep Dive Workshop to learn how to incorporate EML into courses. This leads to a breadth of EML touchpoints for all students. Most of the courses that incorporate EML are in the freshmen to junior year, and the faculty are working to incorporate EML into more senior-year courses as well. We attended the KEEN Deep Dive Workshop last summer. As civil engineering professors with a geotechnical specialty, we have both taught and co-taught the sophomore-level course Geology for Engineers. This class was not well-loved by the students because of its lack of design content and also because the department selected this as the course for the students to write an individual term paper. The workshop helped us select EML activities to improve our course and motivate our students. Here’s howwe revamped the course in both large and small ways. Building EML Foundations in Geotechnical Engineering T he large, time-consuming change was “flipping the course” and it proved to be completely worth the effort. In our flipped classroommodel, stu- dents are expected to watch and read assignedmaterials prior to covering a topic in the classroom. Classroom time is devoted to group discussions and activities that emphasize application of basic geology concepts to civil engi- neering problems. We rely on pre-class videos and online quizzes for introduc- tory content, brief in-class lectures to deliver technically-related content and review important points, and in-class activities – which is primarily how EML is incorporated into the course. Kristin Sample-Lord, Assistant Professor Villanova University Andrea Welker, Associate Dean and Professor Villanova University Article co-authored by: GUIDED EXPLORATION OF ESSENTIAL GEOLOGY CONCEPTS OUTCOMES: REMEMBER, UNDERSTAND, EXPLAIN, CLASSIFY VIDEO QUIZ (BLACKBOARD) PRE-LECTURE VIDEOS (BLACKBOARD/ MEDIA SITE) OUTCOMES: APPLY, ANALYZE, EVALUATE, COMPARE, CREATE ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS & ACTIVE LEARNING ACTIVE LEARNING (GROUP WORK) CONCEPT REVIEW & ENGINEERING EXAMPLES (LECTURE) PRE-CLASS: IN CLASS: The “outcomes” in the figure correspond to learning objectives following Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy. The course content was intentionally developed to address lower-level outcomes outside of the classroom, allowing for more focus on higher-level outcomes during the class period while working in groups under our guidance. FLIPPING THE COURSE SIDEWAYS Figure 1 Course structure for Geology for Engineers. Blackboard (our learning management system) ahead of time and each lecture is organized into parts “A” and “B.” Part “A” includes material that students must complete before class, and “B” includes the material covered during the class period, such as group activities and assignments. Figure 1 in the syllabus helps students understand the course structure. The pre-class videos are a combination of narrated PowerPoint presentations and freely available videos from other geoscience educators – our favorite source is GeoScience Videos. In addition, the Science Education Resource Center has been a useful site for generating ideas for in-class activities and assignments in geology. We carefully planned and organized how our students interacted with the flipped course material. All of the course content is posted on