POGIL Based classes for Communication Engineering Course

This paper summarises the research carried out on the active learning technique “Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning” (POGIL) in communication engineering course. The contents of Communication Engineering are highly theoretical and involves more of analytical work. Traditionally this course was taught by mere lecturing in passive learning style. This passive learning makes the generation Y learners to do rote learning for the assessment purpose. These series of activities lead to unemployability irrespective of their grades. To achieve the desired learning outcomes, educationalist worldwide follows different active learning techniques including inquiry based learning. Inquiry-based learning incorporates a range of questions which enhances the student’s critical thinking skills and makes the students to construct the knowledge on their own. Concurrently it needs the following i) specifically designed instructional activity sheets from the instructors for learning ii) Accurate assessment of prior knowledge for overall improvement in learning and iii) scaffolding interventions by the instructor to pay for the increased cognitive demands on beginners. Accordingly, the following strategy is defined for the creation of learning material. The first step is to systematically analyse the contents to come up with minimum common learning content or a structure to be followed throughout. Next step is to identify if there is any prior learning required? If so, teach the students the minimum required prior knowledge content along with the required common content and complete it in few classes. Third step is to prepare the activity sheets with critical thinking questions based on their prior knowledge and the minimum common content already taught. With respect to this, two kinds of activity sheets were created based on the content difficulty level. For conceptual understanding, lasting effect on student was made by creating the contents linking with day to day activities. For higher cognitive level, questions were prepared by going deep into the content for activity sheet creation. By solving the activity sheets in group together with the guidance by the instructor, students were supported to master the basic knowledge of communication engineering. Also, it challenges the students to adopt to any new problems This paper has been divided into four parts, where the first part reviews relevant background on active learning and POGIL, compares POGIL to other forms of active learning, and describes the potential of POGIL for communication engineering. Second part explains the development of activity sheet with an example both for conceptual level understanding and higher cognition level in the blooms taxonomy. The third part relates the work to CDIO standard and the last part analyses the feedback received by the students and discusses the future direction

Proceedings of the 13th International CDIO Conference in Calgary, Canada, June 18-22 2017