Enhancing Collaborative Project-based Learning Using Participatory Design Approach

In this work-in-progress paper, an innovative curriculum design process using participatory design strategy is presented. The principle of participatory design is to involve the end users (which are the students in our case) in every stage of the design process. Guided by the theory of situated learning, the faculty and student co-designers re-examined the Collaborative Project-based Learning (CPBL) model based on the evidence collected to identify effective pedagogical components to address the learning needs of under-represented minority students. In the course redesign process, the faculty and students worked together to improve the pedagogical methods based on cognitive apprenticeship and its four building blocks including content, method, sequence, and sociology. The redesigned course is currently being offered in Spring 2014, where both qualitative and quantitative data are collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the course redesign. We expect to share both the course re-design process and what we learn from the implementation of the re-designed course with the broad engineering education community during the conference.