2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With the exception of working as a teaching assistant, few opportunities exist to prepare graduate students for the teaching component in their future faculty careers. However, even if a graduate student serves as a teaching assistant, most experiences support existing, well established courses, and there is little opportunity to learn how to design and create material for a new course. Considering that many of the students in our course had few if any opportunities to serve as teaching assistants, the instructors saw an opportunity to address this training gap and create a project in the course to (1) strengthen student’s educational design skills, (2) utilize collaborative learning to support course relevant knowledge gain, and (3) develop laboratory modules to complement the existing lecture course. In spring 2022, the XXX XXX: Tissue Microenvironment course, associated with the XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX NIBIB T32 Training Program, was offered as before but with a new project. The new project focused on educational design and content development of a new laboratory course to complement XXX XXX. Nine students from four engineering disciplines enrolled and completed the course. The course consisted of scientific/technical lectures related to the tissue microenvironment, information on educational design from a teaching and learning specialist in the university’s teaching and learning center, a lecture/demonstration from a faculty member in the College of Education on use of augmented and virtual reality in education, and multiple project check-ins with instructors and peers. Students were asked to individually create a table of contents for a tissue microenvironment laboratory course. Then, students presented their ideas to instructors and peers, received feedback, and discussed general themes; from this process, one table of contents was created. Students created teams in which to design the laboratory modules based on their knowledge and interest. At the end of the semester, students delivered presentations of the final modules. Each module consisted of learning objectives, introduction/background information, materials and equipment list, a detailed protocol, and references. The instructors knew this would be an opportunity to support student’s career development but were unsure of the usability and relevant content that would be delivered in the final module. However, the students readily engaged and voiced opinions to shape the final content; they also worked well in interdisciplinary teams to iteratively redesign the modules based on feedback, refined their learning objectives, and contributed not only to their groups but to the class. The instructors were impressed with the outcomes and have incorporated the project into the course again in fall 2023 but with updates to address some areas of improvement. In this paper, we will describe what went well and areas of improvement for the process used, the connection between the project and the course, and the outcomes.