EXTROVERT: Improving comprehension to innovate across disciplines

As systems become more complex and ever more tightly integrated, the engineer who must innovate solutions faces an ever-increasing plethora of disciplines to understand. The central problem considered in this paper is how to prepare learners to innovate in such an environment. The context is set in a School of Aerospace Engineering with a large student throughput. The guiding philosophy behind this paper is that the breadth across disciplines, needed for such innovation must be accompanied by uncompromising depth of understanding. Three years of progress are summarized on EXTROVERT, a project designed to build and use resources that help aerospace engineers learn to innovate across disciplines. Experience from several courses and projects is summarized on how engineering student learn using different resources. The approach of this effort is to enable learners to gain confidence in solving problems, using with their own preferences in determining the learning sequence. Concepts implemented include a portal to aerospace engineering centered on conceptual design of flight vehicles, vertical streams of in-depth technical content, engineering case studies of historically significant vehicle systems, a library of solved problems, integrative concept essays, and a module-based assessment approach to measure learning in near real time to provide feedback and modification during the learning process. Assessment has been conducted across a spectrum of courses. Compact e-books have been developed for several subjects including advanced concept development projects. The EXTROVERT resources have been exploited in courses ranging from a freshman engineering introductory course to upperclass and graduate courses. An inspiring metric is in the quantum jump in the capabilities of most of the students, and their very thoughtful reflections on what they have gained. These new capabilities are significant enough to warrant a reconsideration of traditional course structure, in order to facilitate much more student participation and iteration.