OUTCOMES AND LESSONS FROM DEPLOYING DIGITAL NOTEBOOKS ACROSS A MULTI-SECTION ENGINEERING DESIGN COURSE

Abstract

The instructor team of large cohort, team- and project-based, first-year engineering design course were faced with a number of common and persistent challenges; effective modelling and scaffolding of the design process; realizing consistent content delivery, marking, and feedback across multiple sections; keeping student teams on track; capturing individual marks related to teamwork; and establishing good design notebook keeping practices. As part of continuing course updates, distributed digital notebooks including worksheets were progressively introduced to support project and team learning activities and individual assessment and feedback. This paper examines the outcomes and lessons learned from the increasingly expanded role these notebooks have taken and their impacts on both instructors and students. In practice, the digital project notebooks have shown themselves to be surprisingly versatile as a platform to 1) deliver course content, 2) enable regular evaluation of individual student participation, contribution, and/or understanding, 3) record and assess team-level progress on the project, and 4) capture and monitor the evolution of team plans and ongoing activities. However, there are some observed costs to the implementation approach taken so far, including potential loss of flexibility, inhibiting teams from taking initiative or learning to manage their own time and effort.