Structural overview

Diversity harnessing

Diversity Harnessing is a technique for engaging diverse-curriculum students in the STEM disciplines. It began to develop by necessity while I was teaching ECE101: Exploring Digital Information Technologies. At first, the students were asked to spend a couple weeks to explore some aspect of Digital Information Technology not explicitly explored in the course. Some of the projects were more or less literature surveys. Although these projects have merit, the presenters reactions did not display the same level of excitement as those of the students presenting hands-on laboratory solutions.

In a second phase, projects were limited to those that required a laboratory aspect (both software and hardware solutions accepted). To facilitate the hardware projects, I found ways to shorten basic portions of the class so that students were better prepared for logic solutions with several weeks remaining in the semester. Labs were also restructured to provide some time for the students to work on projects within the regular lab sessions. Presentations are now done during the final lab session. The entire ECE staff (instructor plus two TAs) offered dedicated assistance to most projects to move them forward.

The feeling of accomplishment expressed by the students as they completed these self-chosen, open-ended projects was unprecedented. The diversity of the project goals attracted the interests of other students as well as a few outside observers. Of course, by the time this excitement peaked, the semester was ended. It became my goal to infect the earlier portions of the course with this same excitement. The task was to find tasks and goals of the students at a time in the semester when they yet know little about the material and much less understand the applications, and then to map those things into materials useful for the course. The obvious problems include how to extract these obscure objectives from the students and map them into useable materials while still performing all the regular day-to-day challenges of teaching: lecture preparation, grading, office hours, writing exams, laboratory preparation, etc. It is all of this that I intend to address under the general methodology of "Diversity Harnessing".

National science foundation grant due-0942331

This module is an overview of the use of Diversity Harnessing in ECE101: Exploring Digital Information Technology at the University of Illinois. It includes a definition of Diversity Harnessing, a description of the course structure needed to support Diversity Harnessing, and the modifications made to the original design as a functional model takes form through its use in ECE101.