Faculty-led Inquiry into Reflective and Scholarly Teaching (FIRST)
Date of this Version
2021
Document Type
Portfolio
Citation
Jin, Congrui Grace. "Course Portfolio for CIVE 378 Materials of Construction, Spring 2021" (2021). UNL Faculty Portfolios, 179. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/prtunl/179
Abstract
CIVE 378 Materials of Construction is a required three-credit course for junior students at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Nebraska Lincoln, which is taught every spring semester. Every spring about seventy undergraduate students register CIVE 378, most of whom are junior students and sophomore students majoring in civil engineering. Teaching quality of this course is very important for students’ learning of the fundamentals of construction materials. The aim of this course portfolio is threefold: (1) to demonstrate the intellectual work of teaching taking place inside and outside of the classroom of CIVE 378; (2) to evaluate the effectiveness of the intellectual work, such as the developed open educational resource (OER) materials and the instructional videos, by systematically investigating, analyzing, and documenting her students’ learning activities; and (3) to communicate this intellectual work to campus or disciplinary conversations. The instructor has totally developed twenty OER learning modules, including “lattice structure of metallic materials”, “tension and torsion of steel”, “aggregate”, “ordinary Portland cement”, “Portland cement concrete”, “admixtures”, “wood”, “asphalt”, “concrete mix design”, “3D printed construction materials” and “using data science to study construction materials”. Each OER learning module is a concise yet self-sufficient teaching unit, and it takes the learn-by-example approach. Each module covers the relevant basic concepts, instructional videos on how to perform a specific experiment, and related practice problems. In particular, for each experiment taught in the laboratory sessions of CIVE 378, step-by-step laboratory protocols and instructional videos are created. The effectiveness of the developed OER materials and instructional videos are evaluated by an in-depth anonymous course survey, students’ feedback to the instructor, and students’ performance.