Planned Chaos in Electrical Engineering Education

This paper presents the idea to intentionally introduce planned chaos into electrical engineering lectures and lab courses to improve students’ learning success. The reason to present this idea are several personal experiences in daily teaching. If students experience some uncertainty in their study...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Fuhrmann, Thomas, Niemetz, Michael
Tipo de recurso: capítulo de libro
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/145780
Acceso en línea:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/145780
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Higher Education
Learning
Educational systems
Teaching
Electrical Engineering Education
Active Learning
Planned Chaos
Descripción
Sumario:This paper presents the idea to intentionally introduce planned chaos into electrical engineering lectures and lab courses to improve students’ learning success. The reason to present this idea are several personal experiences in daily teaching. If students experience some uncertainty in their study program, it is seen that they have higher challenges and therefore higher learning success in managing uncertain situations. In these ways, students acquire methodical and social competences to deal with uncertainty and achieve productive results in an unstable working environment. If, however, the chaos is too large, students are over-strained with the situation, distracted from the actual learning targets and consequently learning results will be worse, drop-out rates will increase and they will be frustrated. The beneficial level of uncertainty depends on the student culture, academic progress and personality characteristics. The competence to deal with complex situations is essential for later professional life where unexpected circumstances occur regularly. Introducing planned chaos into lectures and lab courses has not to be confused with a missing didactic concept and is no justification for a bad preparation. Planned chaos is a demanding concept for professors to find the right implementation for an optimized learning outcome. These described findings are experienced from practical work and student evaluations.