Extending engineering specialty course concepts in electrical engineering education

Abstract

Undergraduate electrical engineering students often fail to see the real life relevance of concepts taught in traditional lectures and classroom instruction. Our research shows how this problem can be addressed. This paper describes the process of developing an Extended Specialty Course Education (ESCE) project for teaching over-voltage courses to junior undergraduates at Wuhan University. This project included two pedagogical components: literature review skills and project-based learning (PBL). First, students are asked to search text-based literatures from electronic databases and analyze the latest over-voltage research results; secondly, students design a project using specialty software in teams to demonstrate core over-voltage concepts. Students’ feedback and a comparison of final exam scores suggest that PBL helps students become more engaged with coursework, improves the cohort’s average final scores and hopefully hones the participants’ critical thinking skills. Since open-ended general comments from participants supported this instructional method, extended educational techniques will be more widely applied in future courses. Several convincing ideas for improving specialized engineering education will be presented after discussing this project.