2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work in progress seeks to examine the idea of role modeling through worked example videos in an open educational resource. Engineering has long struggled with the recruitment and the retention of underrepresented groups. Though there has been a lot of attention given to this issue in the engineering education literature, progress in the area has been slow, and women and students of color remain underrepresented in both the student body and in the faculty body. Role models have been shown to be a powerful tool to combat the issues of underrepresentation, but this presents a chicken-and-egg problem because women and students of color remain underrepresented in the faculty body, which leads fewer role models for the student body, which then impacts the faculty body of the future.

Worked example problems serve as foundational element of many engineering mechanics courses, and increasingly worked example videos are being used to replace or supplement the in-person problem solving done by the instructor. While the instructor serves as the de facto role model for problem solving in the traditional lecture environment, newer strategies or technologies such as flipped classrooms, digital textbooks, digital learning resources, smart tutoring systems, or just-in-time instructor can rely on pre-recorded instructional videos. When developing the videos used with these strategies, we can critically examine not only how the instructor models problem solving, but also who is doing the role modeling. Even if the diversity of the faculty body at a given location is limited, the diversity showcased in these videos does not need to be similarly limited.

Past work has looked at representation of women and students of color through video, but much of that research centered on elements added to the curriculum specifically for the purposes of providing role models to new students. Worked example videos provide an alternate method to bring in diverse representation of experts. Because these videos do not center on the identity of the presenter, they will likely be a more subtle way of showcasing diversity, but because worked examples are already so widespread in engineering education, it can serve as a far more pervasive role modeling strategy.

In this work specifically, the author worked with a diverse set of former mechanics students to create a set of worked example videos that were integrated into an open educational resource used as an integral part of a flipped classroom environment across the statics and dynamics courses over one year. Students in these classes were surveyed towards the end of each semester on their impressions and preferences, and the results have been complied. Because class sizes were small, with only a handful of women and students of color, the results should be viewed as preliminary. Larger classes would of course offer greater statistical significance; however, it is also important to note that the diversity of representation is most limited in smaller programs such as the one examined. The paper concludes by discussing the various avenues available to continue this work.