Mapping Learning Outcomes and Topics across the Undergraduate Curriculum by Professor Karen Willcox
You are cordially invited to a seminar by Professor Karen Willcox.
Abstract
This talk will discuss two ongoing educational projects aimed at mapping topics and outcomes across the undergraduate curriculum at MIT.
First, the Crosslinks (crosslinks.mit.edu) project maps how topics connect across courses. Topics are linked by way of prerequisite relationships, i.e., more advanced topics require earlier, more fundamental topics. In this way, a network of topics is formed, and the learning pathway for any topic is easily seen. The Crosslinks page for each topic comprises seven components – Prepare, Learn, Assess, Apply, Relate, Advance and Visualize – corresponding to a facet of comprehension. These components provide different types of learning resources to help the student achieve the measurable outcomes associated with the topic.
Second, the MIToces (mitoces.mit.edu) project maps the relationships among outcomes across the aerospace engineering undergraduate curriculum at MIT. Through this project, we expanded upon existing sets of outcomes and created new sets where none previously existed to connect subjects in the undergraduate curriculum in an integrated framework. More than 1000 outcomes have been collected from more than 20 subjects in the department and from several prerequisite subjects outside the department (e.g., mathematics, physics, materials science). This talk will describe the projects’ concept, design and implementation, present analysis from ongoing usage studies, and discuss plans to launch similar initiatives at SUTD.
About the Speaker
Karen Willcox is Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics in the Aerospace Computational Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also Co-Director of the MIT Center for Computational Engineering.
She holds a Bachelor of Engineering Degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and masters and PhD degrees from MIT. Before joining the faculty at MIT, she worked at Boeing Phantom Works with the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft design group.
Her research and teaching interests lie in computational simulation and optimization of engineering systems with two major research focuses. The first is model reduction for large-scale systems with applications in unsteady aerodynamics, flow control, uncertainty quantification, inverse problems, and decision under uncertainty. The second is multi-fidelity methods for design under uncertainty, with particular emphasis on aircraft system design.