ABSTRACT Our MOOC on Engineering Mechanics aims to develop in our learners ‘Engineers’ eyes’. Over 50 small videos support three interdependent strands: experiments that learners can do themselves; classical Engineering Analysis; and design applications. Learning activities span the technology spectrum from on-line Adaptive Tutorials to paper and pencil ‘Retro Tutorials’. It all produces a flood of data on student backgrounds, their progression, and their response to the course. To avoid being overwhelmed by this invaluable resource, we have automated the analysis. Attrition rates are typical of MOOCs (despite continuous improvement), but learners who stay the course give glowing reports.

This article shares a best practice for developing a Common Read program grounded in a culturallysustainingpedagogy(Paris,2012)withinadiverseurbancommunitycollege. The authors make the argument for choosing memoirs by Latinx/Hispanic authors to promote greater cultural understanding and connections for both students and faculty, especially in light of the current political climate in the United States. Recent memoirs by Rosie Perez, Sonia Sotomayor, Richard Blanco and others are discussed as strong examples of successful Common Read texts, and a suggestion is made for a HETS and/or HACU-wide Common Read program.

CONTEXT Like the dog that caught a bus, when we caught a MOOC we wondered what to do with it. We decided to invite people to develop 'Engineers' Eyes' through learning basic engineering mechanics. MOOC participants come from a love of a topic or interest in it, but they have other competing interests. They sign on at the click of a mouse, and can just as easily bail out. We had to make our offering interesting. We aimed for friendly, authoritative and fun.

Design education aims to develop in students the confidence to apply engineering fundamentals to the design of products and systems and this can only be achieved through intensive education and exposure to real-life engineering problems. Current issues in teaching engineering design, include the resources and labour intensive nature needed for the subject. In practice, when developing a design, engineers are dependent on the situation at hand, so goals, problems and constraints are often ill defined and may change as the problem continues to unfold. There is no single ideal solution. Assumptions and estimations are required before each analysis step, and the results need to be evaluated against the desired functional output. Often, many analysis iterations are required before a suitable solution is found. When teaching, providing the same scenario requires that tutorial guidance must adapt to the particular solution that each individual student devises. Conventional online tutorials can help to combat some of these issues, but they are not able to track the student progress in detail, nor are they able to provide customisable feedback, based on student progress. The aim of the research is to develop engineering design software tools that can address key problems in current engineering design education and provide students with a more effective and enriching educational experience. This paper discusses a response to these issues in design education in engineering, in the form of adaptive tutorials, and puts forward the preliminary analysis of their success in helping students overcome the limitations of current design education.

Online interactive systems offer the beguiling prospect of an improved environment for learning at minimum extra cost. We have developed online interactive tutorials that adapt the learning environment to the current learning status of each individual student. These Adaptive Tutorials (ATs) modify the tasks given to each student according to their previous responses. Feedback, assessment and remediation are also adapted. Over a three-year period we progressively blended ATs into notoriously challenging courses in introductory Engineering Mechanics. We assessed the impact of this initiative by reviewing three lines of data: (i) the built-in diagnostics of the system, (ii) changes in student grades from year-to-year and (iii) supplementary surveys. Generally, students liked the new blended system and grades improved. Detailed analysis revealed nuances in the measures of student learning, such as differences between high-performing and low-performing students. With these insights we are able to further adapt the system to meet the learning needs of our students.

In 2002 we first ran an innovative teaching initiative for 1st year students in our School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. For students it was very successful, but for us the effort involved threatened to become unsustainable. Having operated our project now for four years we are learning about what we need to do to make it sustainable, and we share some of our insights in this paper. We conclude that when embarking upon a new project we should not only consider how to initiate it, but also how to keep it sustainable in the long term. To help us visualize the challenge we have devised a sustainability diagram. But would we really let questions of sustainability stop us if we were passionate about our next idea?

Background: Engineering design is widely considered to be one of the pivotal elements of engineering education. However, design remains a subject that engineering students find the most difficult to grasp. This difficulty stems from the differences in the traditional engineering science-based courses, and the creative skills required for design courses. The traditional science-based courses in engineering provide the students with a clear reference point for right or wrong answers and follow a strategic formula-based approach that can be applied to all similar problems. This is not the case with engineering design, where there are no right or wrong answers, and each problem can have multiple solutions. Despite incorporating long-practiced teaching and learning approaches for engineering design courses, current methodologies continue to suffer from some inherent shortcomings. Due to variability in student response to various engineering design problems, and the 'no right way' to answer problems, educators find it difficult to evaluate student performance in complex design. Additionally, providing performance feedback to students in a timely and efficient manner is extremely costly for complex design tasks, in particular for the large class sizes that are common today. The current multi-institutional project was designed to redress this challenge. The development of Adaptive Toolboxes, consisting of Adaptive Tutorials (ATs) has been undertaken in this research. ATs assemble and integrate the mathematical tools and concepts required to preform a relatively simple but authentic design tasks. The current project builds on previous success in providing tailored feedback to students in mechanics courses, but also providing educators access to complex analytical data based on student responses. The current paper outlines the preliminary implementation of two ATs can be used in teaching engineering design courses at UNSW, Australia. Purpose: The overall aim of this project is to address the current shortcomings in providing timely and efficient feedback to both students and educators in design education. The ability to provide individualised feedback to students can help to ensure student engagement and understanding of the subject matter, and potentially allow educators better flexibility in assessing the overall student performance. The current project investigates the use of ATs in the classroom to support learning (OLT ID13-2837). The effectiveness of such tutorials in supporting online-learning is examined. This study focuses on the design of a flywheel and design of a beam as the two ATs used in this preliminary investigation for the teaching of design in Mechanical Engineering. These ATs provide on-demand access to authentic design experiences with guided support and immediate, tailored feedback for the students. One of the main benefits that could increase student understanding of subject matter is the ability of the tutorials to support the basic difficulties that are seen in design education - current tutorials allow for multiple variable entries, thereby permitting multiple possible solutions and timely individualised feedback to cater for the multiple solutions. Design/Method: This paper focuses on the implementation of the Mechanical Engineering ATs - the design of the flywheel, and the design of a beam at UNSW, Australia. The current experimental approach comprises 760 Proceedings of the AAEE2014 Conference Wellington, New Zealand, Copyright Alexandra, Vassar; Gangadhara Prusty; Lorelle Burton; Jeung-Hwan Doh; Robin Ford; Matthew James; Nadine Marcus; Fidelis Mashiri; Jan H.F. Meyer; Roberto Ojeda; Mohammad Uddin; and Tim White, 2014. both qualitative and quantitative research methods. For the qualitative analyses, survey data was collected to examine the efficiency of ATs in teaching engineering design tasks. Surveys were conducted at the completion of each of the ATs to gauge student experience and engagement with the subject matter. This has included documenting any benefits to learning achieved (eg., better understanding of concepts after completing the AT). Quantitative assessment was undertaken to understand student performance in each question. Statistical analysis of assessment scores, time spent on each of the questions, number of attempts made for each question have been undertaken to help understand any particular areas of difficulty or concern with the subject matter. Additionally, one-way analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) tests have been conducted to find any significant differences in the pass/fail rates in each of the different courses where the ATs have been implemented, in comparison to the previous year where no ATs were used in the same course. Results: The aim of the study is centred on improving the student experience in design-based engineering courses, by using online-based Adaptive Workshops. The research found that students were able to better understand the subject matter via the improved feedback loops provided; and both the student and the educator were able to make necessary adjustments to cater for the individual learning needs of students. Additionally, surveys found that students had a better and more enjoyable learning experience through the use of the ATs. However, a third of students have found the ATs hard to navigate, which would effort needs to be invested in improving the navigation aspect of the ATs, so that students can focus limited cognitive resources on the subject matter. These preliminary results are in line with other research that shows students feel that ATs are beneficial to their learning (Khawaja et al., 2013). The results indicated a better pass rate in the subject with the introduction of ATs, also in line with earlier studies that have shown that the progressive introduction of ATs to the course Mechanics of Solids curriculum resulted in the steady increase of pass rate marks in that course (Prusty et al. 2011; Khawaja et al. 2013). Conclusions: The use of ATs in teaching engineering design has resulted in improvements to the way educators are able to analyse student needs. This can further translate to improved student engagement and increased understanding of the subject matter, achieved through the improved, timely and individualised feedback mechanisms. The preliminary results of this research suggest that ATs do not necessarily result in higher student performance can improve overall performance of students in the subject and increase their understanding of the subject matter. Addressing This will in turn allow for better structure to the design of courses and the ability to efficiently understand and address any gaps in student knowledge. Preliminary results indicate that the inclusion of ATs in the teaching curriculum does not necessarily translate to higher marks or deeper student engagement; no statistically significant differences were seen in the final exam results in the subject. However, initial data suggests a higher overall pass rate for the subject with the inclusion of multiple ATs. Overall student feedback has suggested that students enjoyed using the ATs and would like these used more often in their subject. One third of students surveyed found that the ATs give them a better understanding of the subject matter. More research is required to support these preliminary results.