The Vocational Faculty Development Training took place September 8-October 3, 2014. With a total of 28 faculty members, the cohort was one of the largest vocational groups ever hosted by Arizona State University. The threeHEEAP Vocational partner institutions were represented in the cohort, including Cao ThangTechnical College, Ho Chi Minh Vocational College of Technology and Industrial University of Ho Chi Minh City.
The visiting faculty members spent their first week at the ASU Tempe campus working with senior lecturer and HEEAP academic director David Benson to explore and learn how to apply aspects of instructional best-practices and active learning principles for education. Faculty also learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy and the role it plays in targeting their level of instruction and in establishing out-comes for their students. They also spent a portion of the week working with Scott Welsh and Nancy Lewis from the American English Cultural Program (AECP) developing English language skills with a focus on engineering education. The second and third weeks of the training were spent at the ASU Polytechnic campus where Kathy Wigal, Scott Danielson and Scott Pollat taught how to design multidisciplinary curriculums and adapt project-ori-ented approaches to instruction. This portion of the training included an opportunity for the faculty members to work in teams on an applied project that consisted of designing, building and testing a small gantry crane.
The gantry crane was controlled by an Arduino Uno micro-controller connected to a laptop computer. The faculty were divided into small teams and every team member was assigned to at least one technical responsibility clearly related to one of the deliver-ables. The five deliverables included: the physical structure, the mechanical crane subsystem (cables, claw, lift, movement, etc.), the electrical sub-system, which included sensors and the wiring associated with theArdu-ino, the Gantry Crane control pro-gram running on the Arduino (source code), and a team project notebook. These applied projects were a great success.
The final week of the training was spent at the ASU Tempe campus where the visiting faculty continued working with Benson and the AECP faculty members to improve their course learning outcomes and to develop a final presentations using the NABC method. In addition, the faculty members developed portfolios that outlined their plans for incorporating the learner-centered and active learning methods in their courses. On the last day of the training the faculty members gave their final presentations detailing the plans for revising their instructional methods.
For more photos, visit the HEEAP Flickr page.