Fall 2001
D. V. Kerns, Provost
This document serves as a summary and guidebook for curricular development at Olin College. The founding faculty have followed the strategic plan outlined in the separate document, Invention 2000, and have constructed a set of principles on which the future development and refinement of the Olin College curriculum will be based, consistent with the founding vision of the trustees. These concepts are summarized here. There are a number of supporting documents including reports from curricular retreats, faculty meetings, and faculty committees focused on various aspects of the curriculum development.
The founding vision of Olin College is expressed through early memoranda of the founding trustees and related conversations with the founding president and the leadership team during the first year of operation of the college (1999-2000). The arrival of the first faculty the following year (2000-2001) provided the opportunity for substantial dialogue including visits to existing schools, retreats, numerous faculty discussions and faculty white-paper reports. The arrival of the second group of faculty (Fall 2001) provided increased diversity of backgrounds and experience, and more detailed dialogue regarding optimum curricular approaches. Curriculum development was greatly enhanced by the arrival of the “Olin Partners” and the opportunity for faculty to evaluate various curricular approaches with students. This report contains information from a variety of these sources and credit must be given to all who participated in the Olin community.
Olin College was created to establish a model engineering program. Olin College was conceived to be a college that addresses many of the concerns identified by the NSF coalitions regarding engineering education as well as a variety of other issues systemic to most existing engineering programs. Olin College was intended to be agile, and responsive to change. The College seeks to institutionalize a culture of continuous improvement and set the highest bar for quality. The Olin culture is to be student centered with a passion for undergraduate education in an environment of personal attention and concern for each student. The College is not to be a copy of any other institution but seek new and innovative approaches to engineering education.
Olin College will not be just a teaching institution. Faculty cannot teach what they do not know, and engineering knowledge becomes outdated within a matter of only a few years. Consequently faculty and students will nurture a culture of innovation, inquiry, problem-solving, entrepreneurship, research, or other means of intellectual vitality to insure that faculty stay current with the latest developments in their field, that they are encourage to explore interdisciplinary areas, and that faculty transmit the results of this intellectual vitality to students both in and outside of the classroom. The voice of industry is critical, and the Olin curriculum will include consideration of industry’s needs.
Therefore, to implement this vision, Olin College recruits exceptional faculty with a passion for inspirational teaching, undergraduate education and for working closely with students inside and outside of the classroom. Olin College will nurture the needs of young students including intellectual growth and development, as well as social and personal development. The intellectual vitality, including research, entrepreneurship, inventions and other activities for keeping current in their field will be valued and supported by the College and faculty will seek to feed back to student this information to inform, enliven, and enrich each students learning.
The Olin College Curriculum will be structured to “open doors to student possibilities”. This implies that the curriculum structure will not channel or focus students early into specific areas and limit their flexibility for future options to move into other related or even non-related fields. The early years of the Olin College curriculum will provide a strong solid foundation that will be an exceptional basis for all forms of engineering study, but also for other disciplines as well. There will be some student choices, and flexibility, even in the early years.
In addition, the Olin curriculum will seek to educate the whole person. This implies supporting not only the engineering, scientific and technical education of students, but also nurture other non-technical aspects of health growth and maturing.
This vision for the Olin curriculum is illustrated graphically by what has come to be known as the “triangle model” illustrated in Figure 1. This concept was first introduced by Professor Dabby in a white-paper as “the Renaissance Engineer”, and through months of discussion and development, adopted as a founding precept of the curriculum.
This triangle shows a superb engineering education at the top. Olin graduates will receive an engineering education comparable to that of the best engineering schools in the country. This implies Olin College students will acquire an in-depth working knowledge of science and mathematics core material and related engineering foundation knowledge. The manner in which this knowledge is acquired may be non-traditional, involving more projects, and close coordination of material, traditionally taught separately, such as physics and introductory engineering topics.
Another corner of the triangle indicates that Olin students will also experience a curriculum that provides elements of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial thinking. This is broadly defined to include not only the fundamentals of business, enabling Olin students to understand the vocabulary of business and consider a future engineering career involving starting their own company, but also the broader aspects of entrepreneurship. These broader concepts include learning organizational and teaming skills, financial and marketing issues, and marshalling resources to accomplish a specific goal. Throughout the Olin curriculum, an effort will have been made to weave threads that emphasize the importance of a spirit of philanthropy and high principles, values, and ethics.
The final corner of the “triangle model” addresses the arts, and broadly encompasses creativity, innovation, and design. It is hoped that design will move toward the center of the Olin curriculum. One cannot design what one cannot imagine; therefore, enhancing creativity is an important precursor to effective design. Creativity and innovation expressed by activities such as student research provide strong educational value. Also imbedded in this dimension of the curriculum is the notion that the performing arts provide important life skills and capabilities. Vigorously preparing for a future moment in time when one must produce one’s best work product is important to practice and to become comfortable in the process. Olin students typically have at least “one other passion” in addition to their engineering interests, and Olin will help nurture this intellectual diversity.
Creative and effective design when combined with entrepreneurial thinking and superb engineering comprise the ingredients for a superb education, educating multiple dimensions of student’s lives and enabling Olin students to develop careers of leadership and positive contributions to society.
It has been decided that the Olin curriculum will include three levels. These are:
The faculty unanimously agreed on a selection of goals for implementation of the Olin curriculum. These are:
All of the above would be realized within the Olin curriculum in a manner consistent with personal attention and concern for the welfare of each individual student.
In order to insure that each student’s program is organized to empower their individual and unique goals, each student will design, propose and continually develop a plan to achieve personal and educational goals. This plan will be reviewed periodically with their faculty advisor and/or faculty committees and continuous improvement of this plan accomplished. The Olin educational experience will begin with some common “immigration experience” that initiates the multidisciplinary foundation and helps develop within the cohort a strong spirit of community.
Timely completion of the multidisciplinary foundation, and possibly earlier achievements, will be certified and assessed by one or more specific events, described as “gates”. These gates will assure that each student has achieved a level of deficiency and fundamental knowledge in areas considered essential by the faculty.
The Olin College calendar will utilize organizational units of time of approximately seven weeks (1/2 semester) in length, termed quamesters. There will be two quamesters in the fall and two in the spring.
It has been often said that a single picture is worth a thousand words. Professor Woodie Flowers attempted to create a graphic to describe the elements of the Olin curriculum that have been generally accepted by the founding faculty. This model is shown in Figure 2.
At the base of this figure are planes representing entrepreneurship, art, and its related aspects of creativity innovation and design, communication and professionalism. These are often said to be “in the water”. This means that these elements are woven through all aspects of the Olin curriculum – through virtually all coursework and curricular as well as co-curricular experiences. This does not exclude the strong possibility that there will also be explicit learning experiences in some of these topics.
At the top of this picture one observes projects and project-based education as a significant ingredient in the Olin curriculum. It has been universally agreed that problem-based education expressed through the substantial use of design and other projects as learning experiences will occur in each year. It is also agreed that in general the proportion of project-based education will increase in time through the four-year curriculum and become more open-ended and authentic. Projects will typically be executed with teams of students and the projects will receive a substantive grading or evaluation. Students will quickly infer that the value we place on projects is related to the time spent in critique and evaluation of their project results. Consequently, the Olin curriculum will include extensive project support and evaluation including faculty and outside experts for evaluation.
Sandwiched in the middle of this picture there are three methods of curriculum delivery described. The lower level showing the fluid and somewhat random interface between student and faculty interactions represents something like the Oxford/Cambridge model. In this approach, student learning occurs more in a tutorial fashion and is guided by student inquiry. This model embraces the notion the fact that students are motivated and learning, and that is perhaps more important than specifically what they are learning. The level above represents the world-wide-web and the rich resources available via the web for student learning. Web-based and new media electronically enabled instruction is another rich resource for material for student education. Finally, the third level shows discipline specific modules more akin to traditional courses. In this level, material is presented in linear fashion following a program sequence similar to traditional courses.
In the Olin curriculum, students may gain knowledge from each of these knowledge resources, dependent upon the curricular design. There will likely be learning from all three delivery modes, with the foundation (particularly the first year more structured, and later years more flexible with more student choices, both in topics and modes of learning.
The students’ acquisition of intended knowledge will be tested and certified by gates shown at the left of the picture which may be viewed as comprehensive examinations to assure that the curriculum process has been successful in transmitting required knowledge, capabilities, and defined competencies.
Another way to view the three primary modes of knowledge delivery is illustrated in Figure 3.
This figure shows another triangle representing various teaching modes or knowledge delivery methods. At the far left is “courses”, the corner where most traditional engineering curricula are located.
The Olin curriculum will be innovative in that it will have a much higher component of both projects and competency based evaluation. It is likely that the Olin foundation will begin more at the “upper left” of this triangle, with a strong mix of course-like material coordinated with projects, and move with time toward the center and right of the triangle to include more competency based methods.
It has been decided that the foundation will take between 1.5 and 2 years. There will be student choices and some flexibility even in the foundation. This is of high priority to our students. This flexibility will include the opportunity to explore at least one other intellectual passion, other than engineering. It is likely that projects will be used to closely coordinate knowledge in two or more fundamental courses in the early part of the foundation, and become more loosely coupled to coursework later in the curriculum. The foundation will be structured so that not every student takes the same thing (there are student choices), but that any choices made during the first year will satisfy the foundation requirement for any of the Olin degrees. In order to make room for the diversity and multiple dimensions of this program, efficiencies will have to be created. There are such opportunities; for example teaching certain foundation material only once, in contrast to traditional curricula where some topics are taught in physics and then again in an engineering context.
The notion of two “tracks” in the curriculum foundation, one with more emphasis on fundamentals, technical engineering and science learning, and the other with opportunities for exploring other dimensions, arts, humanities, entrepreneurship, and a wide range of practica has emerged as a strong model for the Olin curriculum. One version of this approach is illustrated in Figure 4. This model attempts to address many of the issues described earlier and provides a flexible and creative framework for innovative engineering education.
The design of the Olin Curriculum must be innovative, flexible, and contain within it the evidence of a commitment to change and continuous improvement. It should not be rigid and inflexible but the opposite. The Olin experience should embrace a wide range of student talents, and open doors to a wide spectrum of student opportunities.
