2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Project-based learning (PBL) courses in higher education require the instructor team to be very resourceful, multi-disciplinarily intellectual and very inspiring. It also needs student teams to be proactive, collaborative and good at inquiries. This learning methodology in higher education might be suitable for small-size resource-rich universities, or universities focused on teaching. For large research universities in short of resources, how to design and implement PBL courses can be challenging for faculty, whose career evaluation metrics are more based on research performance instead of teaching excellence. This work thus explores the methodology of PBL courses for engineering students in large research universities with no adequate resources.

We propose a PBL course design methodology with evolving regional entrepreneurs in the instructing team. The methodology includes four parts - a project selection framework focusing on output openness and impact, entrepreneur instructor selection criteria and training system, an incentive system for university faculty, entrepreneur teacher and students, and a platform for project management, file documentation and reuse of the projects archival data. To test the effectiveness of the PBL course design methodology, we performed two experiments in Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, in a form of a three-week summer school. Two-year data was collected including archival course data, interview data of students, faculty and entrepreneurs and four student survey data. We found that involving entrepreneur instructors in the course added the perceived impact of the projects which makes students more proactive in inquiry and more disciplined in documentation their progress. More results are forth-coming.