Transcriber:	Michelle You
Brief Bio:
Date finished:	1/18/06
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MIT OpenCourseWare

Professor Waitz

Unified Engineering

16.03

0:10

Q: Hi, can you tell us your name and what course you teach?

A: My name is Ian Waitz and I teach Unified Engineering.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about the class?

A: It's a large class that put together by several different faculty members who have taught in this ways for about 25 to 30 years.

0:29

Q: And in which department?

A: In Aeronautics and Astronautics. And it provides education and several important disciplines for aerospace engineering or aeronautics and astronautics. Structures, Fluids, Propulsion, Thermodynamic, Computers and Programming, Signals and Systems, and System Engineering.

0:51

And those are taught in an integrated way over a yearlong period and it's two semesters with two subjects per semester. So it is equivalent of four subjects put together in one.

1:05

Q: How many students take this and what year are they?

A: It is the entry lever subject or set of subjects for our department so all students who are coming from our department take it and they all take it in sophomores primarily. And this year we have about 75 students in it.

1:22

Q: And I understand there is about a team approach to teaching this class. Can you describe how that works out in that way?

A: Yes. It evolved over time but with each a lot of certain number of lectures that the total number of lectures and for each lecture there is a homework that goes with that. And those lectures are all interwoven with one and another in a certain order that makes some sense in term of delivery of the material.

1:50

And it's team taught but you show up and teach your lectures and you tend to work with other people to understand what they are teaching at the same time you're teaching and you are trying to develop common problems, common home work problems, that address more than one discipline that you can look at some of the interrelationships and trade off between the different disciplines.

2:13

Q: Ok. What do the students do in class? Is it primarily lecture or do they work in group on projects or ...?

A: Yea, the classes are lecture based but we have adopted a lot of active learning strategies and we've done that for last several years. There are two techniques we used predominately, one we called personal response system. PRS is a commercially available product. It's a small television clicker I got one here some place.

2:40

So this is a television clicker. And typically in the lecture there will be one or two questions that are asked sometimes three or four. And the students response to these with the television clickers and in the real time the class gets the responses back that we can look at graphs of their responses.

3:00

So it's a short, you know, five or ten minutes lecture with a question and another short five or ten minutes lecture with another question. And it allows you with real time understand what they're having difficulty with and what things make progress on the understanding and adjust your lecture as you go.

3:20

That's the primary in class technique for engaging with students. We don't grade them on whether or not they get the right response. We just grade them on whether or not they hit the button. So as a part of the subject grade, there is an attendance score which is calculated by how many times they press the button out of the total number of questions that are asked such as two or three per lecture.

3:43

The second thing that we do for each lecture, at the end we finish lectures a few minutes early, and we ask the students to fill out the Muddiest Part of The Lecture cards. So here are some from my lecture today. What we asked them was to take two or three minutes to reflect on the items that were discussed in the lecture and which part was the least clear so the muddiest part of the lecture. And these are terrific.

4:10

With these you can find out in this anonymous way in the students' homework which things that they found to working, which things that they found to be difficult. And often you'll find that items that tripping them off are the symbols that you used or there is some ...

4:29

They had some lack of understanding, or some deficiency remembering some prerequisite subject materials you presumed they had. And getting this after each lecture then you can take action on these either by modifying your next lecture. What I do to response them all on the subject web page I just write short answers for each of the questions so students can go and look at that.

4:54

So those are the two techniques we used within the lectures for better feedback and for active learning, also serials of laboratory exercises on system problems. I presume you'll get interviewed with Charles Colman or something to talk about that aspect of course.

5:13

Q: Ok, and by using laboratory assignment as well as some special elements like field trips or something as requested?

A: Yes, there are variety special elements for unified as a whole. For the lectures that I teach, one of things I do is, we learn an engineer and teach in front of the engine. It's a real engine. It's a CFM56, which powers 737 Boeing 737 airplanes.

5:40

And when you're talking about propulsion having, you know, a couple of millions dollars worth hardware there to point to and shake and having students asking questions about it, is very, very helpful.

5:54

So there are elements like that are a lot of in class small demonstrations that each of us do we ask people to work problems, or estimate things or smallen(??) classes experiments. All of those are in the context of these concept questions or many of them are. We ask students to observe the experiments to think about it, to response to some questions. All intended to demonstrate the physical principles or to get them to think about concepts in the class.

6:23

Q: Well, we want to thank you very much for making the materials available through MIT Open Courseware. And is there anything you think of you'd like someone to know about how you unified the taughts(??) or anything that might not be obvious from just view the materials on line?

6:37

A: You know I was just saying that it is very important to us in developing and delivering the materials that will be viewed by students in an interactive way. It's a package. So that none of the sets of materials were developed as independent pieces on Thermodynamic or Fluids. But they were developed within the context and being integrated with the course.

7:06

And we think that it is very important course for educating students in Aeronautics and Astronautics to do have this integrated on system level of view to have pieces together. And we prefer to start that early and doing all at once and rolling in their careers and then have them take disciplines in specialties later on, rather than visa versa.

7:26

So that's the only thing I'd like to point out about it that really has been developed to be an integrative learning environment.

Q: Well, thank you very much for your time.

A: My pleasure.

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