Collaborative Experiential Learning Model Applied to Enhance Learning of Basic Electrical Freshman Course

Abstract

An entrant to engineering has to undergo many fundamental courses in the first year of curriculum. Basic Electrical Engineering is one amongst these courses. The traditional way of teaching the course was teacher-centric and aid used for teaching was chalk and talk. Less emphasis was given for student interaction. Traditional style of teaching rarely gives students the opportunity to apply their newfound knowledge to actual situations, resulting in a serious time lag between students learning and applying new knowledge. As a result many students have trouble determining the relevance of what they are being taught, and thus lacking any obvious need to learn and fail to engage in the learning process. In teaching learning process, learning style of an individual is important to undergo different learning cycle. The three main types of learning styles are, auditory, visual, and tactile. With the help of a tool students learning style was identified through a set of questionnaires which helped to design an activity depending upon the learning styles of a student. From the survey it has been identified the majority of the class are visual learners which helped in designing an activity. The proposed model is applied to the course on Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering. Apart from the regular classroom teaching, principles of instruction was used to select, plan and develop an activity based on Industry visit to enhance students learning. To realize the impact of learning happened through the industry visit pertaining to topic on actuators the written examination was conducted and feedback at two intervals, before and after the industry visit was taken. Individual question wise inferential statistical analysis using paired t-test was performed and inferred that the activity improved the knowledge and exposure level of a student with different learning style. From the activity it is also inferred that though a small percentage of students are auditory learners, visual learning has helped the student to enhance the conceptual learning through visualization.