Course Introduction by Prof. Waitz Unified Engineering, Fall 2005 - Spring 2006

INTERVIEWER: Hi. Can you tell us your name and what course you teach? PROF. WAITZ: My name is Ian Waitz and I teach Unified Engineering. INTERVIEWER: Can you tell us a bit about the class? PROF. WAITZ: It is a large class that is put together by several different faculty members. We have taught it this way for about 25 or 30 years. INTERVIEWER: In which department? PROF. WAITZ: In Aeronautics and Astronautics. And it provides education in several of the important disciplines for Aerospace Engineering or Aeronautics and Astronautics; structures, fluids, propulsion, thermodynamics, computers and programming, signals and systems and systems engineering. And those are all taught in an integrated way over a year long period. And it is two semesters with two subjects per semester, so it is the equivalent of four subjects put together in one. INTERVIEWER: And how many students take this and what year are they? PROF. WAITZ: It is the entry-level subject, or set of subjects for our department, so all students who come into our department take it. And they all take it as sophomores primarily. And this year we have about 75 students in it. INTERVIEWER: And I understand there has been a bit of a team approach to teaching the class. Can you describe how that was worked out? PROF. WAITZ: Yes. It has evolved over time but we are each allotted a certain number of lectures of the total number of lectures. And for each lecture there is a homework that goes with that. And those lectures are all interwoven with one another in a certain order that makes some sense in terms of the delivery of the material. And it is team taught. But you show up and teach your lectures and you tend to work with the other people to understand what their teaching at the same time that you are teaching. You try and develop common problems, common homework problems that stress more than one discipline so that you can look at some of the inner-relationships and trade-offs between the different disciplines. INTERVIEWER: OK. So what do students do in class? Is it primarily lecture or do they work in groups on projects? PROF. WAITZ: The classes are lecture-based but we have adopted a lot of active learning strategies. And we have done that for the last several years. There are two techniques that we use predominantly. One we call the Personal Response System, PRS. It is a commercially available product. It is a small television clicker. I have got one here some place. So this is the television clicker. And typically in a lecture there will be one or two questions that are asked, sometimes three or four, and the students respond to these with these television clickers. And in real-time in the class we get the responses back. And we can look at graphs of their responses. So it is a short five or ten minute lecture with a question. Another short five or ten minute lecture, another question. And that allows you in real-time to understand what they are having difficulty with and what things they have made progress on understanding and adjust your lecture as you go. That is the primary in-class technique for engaging the students. We don't grade them on whether or not they get the right response. We just grade them on whether or not they have hit the button. So it is part of the subject grade. There is an attendance score which is calculated by how many times they have pressed the button out of the total number of questions that are asked. And, as I said, it is two or three per lecture. The second thing that we do for each lecture is at the end we finish the lectures a few minutes early and we ask the students to fill out the muddiest part of the lecture cards, so here are some from lecture today, where we ask them to take two or three minutes and reflect on the items that were discussed in lecture and which part was the least clear. So the muddiest part of the lecture. And these are terrific. With these you can find out, in an anonymous way, in the student's own words which things they found to work and which things that they found to be difficult. And often you find that items that are tripping them up are the symbols that you used or that they have some lack of understanding or some deficiency in remember some prerequisite subject material that you had presumed that they had. And getting this after each lecture then you can take action on these either by modifying your next lecture or what I do is respond to them all on the subject webpage. So I just write short answers for each of the questions and the students can go and look at that. So those are the two techniques that we use within the lectures for better feedback and for active learning. There is also a series of laboratory exercises and systems problems, but I presume you will get an interview with Charles Coleman or something to talk about that aspect of the course. INTERVIEWER: But you had said that there are laboratory assignments as well, and there are other special elements. There are field trips and things for this class. PROF. WAITZ: Yes, there are a variety of special elements for Unified as a whole. For the lecture that I teach, one of the things that I do is wheel in an engine and teach in front of the engine. And it is a real engine. It is a CFM56 which powers Boeing 737 airplanes. And when you're talking about propulsion, having a couple millions dollars worth of hardware there to point to and shake and have the students ask questions about is very, very helpful. So there are elements like that. There are a lot of in-class small demonstrations that each of us do where we ask people to work problems where they estimate things or small in-class experiments. All of those are in the context of these concept questions, or many of them are where we ask the students to observe an experiment, to think about it and to respond to some question all intended to demonstrate physical principles or to get them to think about concepts in the class. INTERVIEWER: OK. Well, we want to thank you very much for making your materials available through MIT OpenCourseWare. Is there anything else you can think of that you would like someone to know about how Unified is taught or anything else that might not be obvious from just viewing the course materials online? PROF. WAITZ: No. I would just say that it is very important to us in developing and delivering the course materials that it be viewed by the students in an integrated way as a package so that none of the sets of materials were developed as independent pieces on thermodynamics or fluids but they were developed within the context of it being an integrated course. And we think that is very important for educating students in aeronautics and astronautics that they do have this integrated system level view of how the pieces fit together. And we prefer to start that early by doing it all at once early in their careers and then have them take disciplinary specialties later on rather than vice versa. So that is the only thing that I would point out about it, that it really has been developed to be an integrative learning environment. INTERVIEWER: OK. Well, thank you very much for your time. PROF. WAITZ: Pleasure.