2021 Teaching Institute logo

ENGR 6: Engineering Graphics & CADD

Course Description

ENGR 6 is the first required major course for Mechanical Engineering students. Hence, most students are freshmen with no prior engineering background. The course is composed of multiple sessions (typically 3-5 sessions in each semester) with 25-30 students enrolled in each session. Each class of the course is composed of a 50-minutes lecture followed by a 75-minutes of lab session.

Before:

Motivation for Redesign

1. Most Engineering Graphics textbooks on the market are thick and expensive, and many students can not buy them. Knowing many students do not have textbooks, I cannot give assignments or tests based on the textbook, which gives students false ideas that they do not need textbooks and do not buy them: The vicious loop starts.

2. The lecture was a one-way instruction and students passively listened to the lecture with little in-class learning activity until the laboratory hours that follows.

After:

1. Rewrote the expensive textbook into an online textbook that is freely accessible to all students.
2. Also added many in-class activities in each module for active learning.

Evidence of Student Learning

Now that all students can access the textbook, I can use the textbook exercises in the assignments. Following a list of module objectives, a link to the relevant chapter(s) of the online textbook is listed at the top of each module in Canvas. Students click the links that open the relevant exercise questions of the textbook in the Canvas assignments.

After each micro-lecture, there is an in-class activity for ensuring students what they learned. After the redesign, the student evaluations were favorable despite they were all online zoom classes.

Evidence of Student Learning
Column Title 1	Column Title 2	Column Title 3
An example of an in-class activity problem on Canvas.	An example of an assignment that has links to the relevant parts of the online textbook.	Introduction module at the top of Canvas. The module includes all information.

Techniques Incorporated Into Redesign

Rewrote the textbook in Latex format first, and then generated a PDF document. And then wrote it again in an HTML format and published the textbook on Merlot.org. It took a while to find the right writing format for the online textbook.

Canvas was used in adding in-class activities. Created tabs on a page so that the micro-lectures and the in-class activities are organized in a relatively short-length page.

Assessment of Redesign Project

I have not solicited any feedback yet, but one of my students sent an email with a question, and in the email stated: "First off, I just wanted to say I really enjoyed yesterday's lecture style. Having the little quizzes in between the slides definitely helped me stay engaged and pay attention to details, and I've never had a teacher do that before." Although students did not express themselves, I encountered one problem: it took much time to switch between the activity and the lecture, especially in the online environment. The course lecture must be carefully designed so that the activities and the lecture contents be well balanced.

Equitable & Inclusive Outcomes for Students

Created an online textbook so that all students can access it without paying a high price for the textbook.

Reflection: Challenges and Lessons Learned

It took a while to convert the paper textbook to an online textbook including the site to publish the textbook for free. I chose Merlot.org and anybody can acccess the textbook for free.

Developing Effective Modules and Microlectures", specifically the "Chunk information into short, standalone videos." Since this course is a hands-on course with the majority on how to use CAD software, practicing by each student is more important than listening to a long verbal lecture. So, each day, the lecture is split into a couple of micro-lectures with videos followed by an activity.

Faculty Biography

Faculty Bio
	Professor Yong Suh Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. I have been teaching in Sac State since 2004. I teach mechanical design, more specifically computer-aided design, design automation, and design for manufacturing.

**Program Sponsors**
	This work was supported by the Sacramento State and The Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund

ONE MORE THING! Go For Green!! Please check the Accessibility Score in each image and if the image/link has a green Accessibility Score icon, you are all set! If not, and it is red, go back and click on each image, then click on the icon in the toolbar and make sure you give a brief but accurate description of the image in the Alt field as this will make this accessible. (Delete these red text instructions after you are done.)