An Approach on Customized Lecturing Based on a Dependency Model
Year: 2012
Editor: Lyndon Buck, Geert Frateur, William Ion, Chris McMahon, Chris Baelus, Guido De Grande, Stijn Verwulgen
Author: Maurer, Maik; Gilbert, Marc; Herzberger, Philipp
Series: E&PDE
Institution: Technische Universit
Section: Design Methods - Modelling
Page(s): 071-076
ISBN: 978-1-904670-36-0
Abstract
This paper introduces an innovative teaching approach, which provides customized curricula for students without being too resource-demanding for lecturers. Students of several disciplines attend the lecture "Complexity Management for Industrial Application". In the past, a selection of methods has been extracted from the topic of complexity management and imparted to students. This selection represents a trade-off between the different interests and needs of students. While some of them are familiar with a specific method, the same method may overburden students from other disciplines. Some methods may even be irrelevant regarding the students’ future scope of work. Thus, the static structure of the current lecture concept and the individual student characteristics are conflicting and limit the effectiveness of teaching. We developed an approach for matching the subject matter to the specific needs of students by using “Structural Complexity Management”. This methodology is designed for acquiring, analyzing, and optimizing the dependencies within complex systems. Our approach results in an arrangement of selected teaching units in lecture blocks, group tutorials and exercises led by tutors. At first, lessons, methods and competences and their mutual dependencies are modeled. Subsequently, students’ interests and needs are linked to the model. Then we compute customized lists of lessons, which represent the individual educational objectives of students. Finally, superimposing and optimizing all customized lists result in the course arrangement.
Keywords: Structural complexity management, customized lecturing model, dependency models, innovative teaching approach, customized curricula