Dr. Carolyn Seepersad joined the ME’s faculty this spring and we are already watching her innovations in the classroom. She was always interested in how things work and by helping her dorm-mates as a college student; she also found that she enjoyed teaching. While at Georgia Tech where she earned her doctorate, she was able to co-teach at the graduate level with her advisor. Georgia Tech has an online master’s degree and approximately 10% of the students in the course she was teaching were online students. The course was videotaped and Carolyn found that she was a “bit tied down by the technology” since you can’t roam at will, but at the same time, she also found many benefits including effective visuals and recorded lectures. An added bonus to teaching distance students is that they are often in far flung locations with unique perspectives. One of her students was a stealth fighter pilot whose class project involved night vision goggles and as Carolyn noted, “It was so cool.”
This spring, she is teaching ME 366J with 85 students. She has the assistance of three TAs, and with their help she and her co-instructor, Matthew Green, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, can focus more on the flow of the class while the TAs provide detailed guidance and on-going feedback on the hands-on projects in twice weekly labs. One unique teaching technique she has introduced is personal design learning journals. With these journals, the students are to explore the “whys” behind design issues and to dig deeper in their thinking. At the end of each major lecture, they are given reflection questions that can be a challenge to write. The questions have to be worded in such a way that the student can build upon existing knowledge and think thoughtfully about a new perspective. Carolyn notes that the trick is to provide enough structure for the undergraduates while keeping them open-ended enough to be thought-provoking. Twenty percent of their course grade is earned with their journal responses and the grading criteria are as follows:
Looking for: lessons learned, generalizations, conclusions or recommendations
Looking for: observations from class, lecture, labs, or other design-related activities
So far Carolyn notes that the students are showing some rather thoughtful insights and that the process of writing a journal is helping them sort through their thinking and helping them to articulate. The journals also provide valuable insights on how well the students learn from the lectures and other class activities. If you want to see some examples, please contact her.
When interviewing at UT, Carolyn was impressed with how often she heard the question, “Do you enjoy teaching?” We think we’ll hear back from her students that they enjoy being in her class.