This award is to William Marsh Rice University to support the activity described below for 36 months. The proposal was submitted in response to the Partnerships for Innovation Program Solicitation (NSF-05566).
Partners
William Marsh Rice University (lead institution) and National Instruments
The primary objective of the proposal is as follows: to revolutionize the way science and engineering are taught by breaking away from traditional textbook and lecture-based education in order to build a new framework, where communities of educators, students, and field practitioners continually interact, collaborate, connect, and explore active content. The specific objectives of the project are to 1) build a world-wide community of educators, students, and practitioners in DSP led by Rice faculty and NI technology evangelists which will develop and refine a critical mass of free Connexions DSP course materials; 2) enrich these materials with interactive LabVIEW visualizations to make the concepts come alive and encourage experimentation, exploration, and design; 3) develop semantic mathematics representations for displaying and exploring science and engineering concepts based on MathML--in particular a suite of tools for authoring, sharing, and exploring mathematics on the web; 4) translate the materials into a number of languages, including Spanish, to reach both local and worldwide audiences; 5). Study the marketing and business issues associated with growing and sustaining the project into a win-win for both the university and industrial partners; and 6) assess the projects impact and widely disseminate the lessons learned.
Potential Educational and Economic Impact
There is a crisis in engineering education today, with decreasing enrollments, less engaged and less prepared students, and pressure to cover increasing amounts of material. Curricula are increasingly stove-piped and disconnected, in spite of research indicating that for women and underrepresented minority students, the study of science and engineering is made meaningful by connections to other fields. Moreover, a leading complaint from industry regarding engineering graduates is their lack of collaboration and team skills and lack of hands-on design experience.
The intellectual merit of the project follows. A new approach has been identified for building and sustaining virtual educational communities around active content and applying the results to the spectrum of engineering education venues: university undergraduate and graduate courses, industrial training and continuing education, just-in-time learning on the job, and high-school laboratories. The research involves and balances education, community development, technology development, marketing and business planning, and impact assessment. The foundation for the project is provided by Rices Connexions Project (cnx.rice.edu) and by NIs LabVIEW (ni.com) DSP platform. Connexions is an open-access repository of free scholarly materials and an open-source software toolkit to help authors publish and collaborate, instructors rapidly build and share custom courses, and learners explore the links among concepts, courses, and disciplines. LabVIEW is a personal computer-based DSP system for interactively visualizing, processing, and interacting with multimedia such as audio, images, and video from a wide range of applications.
The broader impacts of the activity follow. This research include the development of people-resources and technologies that will substantially increase the performance and capabilities of engineering educators and that will open up education into underdeveloped parts of the State of Texas, the Nation, and the world. In particular, education in DSP and related technologies is critical to sustain the high-tech complex in Dallas, Austin, and Houston, Texas. Additional educational impacts include the training of undergraduate and graduate students involved in this project and two workshops that will bring together DSP educators and practitioners to share their knowledge and build communities.
