The modern day university was born out of a collective of charismatic scholars who were able to entertain, enthrall, educate and attract students from across Europe to cities such as Bologna, Paris, Padua, Prague, and Vienna. These masters, as the scholars were called, developed and delivered their own lectures and in process educated students in the liberal arts, theology, law and medicine. Although the masters often travelled to other Studia Generale across Europe to share documents and learnings, with the invention of the printing press in 1450 it suddenly became possible for the learnings of one master to be delivered by another, perhaps less skilled master, at another Studia Generale. Through this evolution the structure of the modern day university was born, whereby professors of varying delivery talents are able to deliver similar curriculum using textbooks of a common root.
Through the development of broadband internet, non-volative memory, inexpensive computers with significant processing capability, and easy to use software it is now relatively simple for anybody to develop, record, and broadcast a lecture through media sites that have global reach. With this development, the lecture has become fully liberated, and in certain respects a reversal has occurred whereby the masters are now directly available to the students, irrespective of student location.
With this change comes new opportunity. The earliest adopters of this technology have found that by placing the lecture on-line it is now possible to free lecture time for other higher-level learning activities, such as Active Learning. Beyond CDIO Standard 8, however, other types of advances are starting to be realized, such as the unbundling of a degree, course, or even a lecture. With this it seems possible that new learning experiences can be imagined and constructed whereby content from different courses are packaged together, enabling Standard 3 (Integrated Curriculum) and Standard 7 (Integrated Learning Experiences) to be considered in ways not previously possible with standard delivery methods.
In the Fall of 2013, an experiment was conducted whereby a third-year (junior level) Mechanical Engineering course was offered on YouTube. Although the content was developed and delivered specifically for students registered in the course, it was also possible for students not registered in the course to watch the content. As part of the investigation, viewing data for students in Canada (assumed to be those taking the course) was compared to viewing data for students in the United States. The nature of what students watched, for how long, and when will be examined and compared. This will provide indication for how students are using this new media for learning, and it will also provide a glimpse into how it can be used for other advances in engineering education pedagogy, specifically in relation to CDIO Standards 3 and 7.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014