Using Graduate Assistants as Project Advisers for Externally-Sponsored Capstone Design Projects

• Autores: Imran Hyder, Drew Arnold, Javier Calvo Amodio, John P. Parmigiani
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 30, no. Extra 1, 2014, págs. 101-111
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Capstone design is an opportunity for students to apply their newly obtained knowledge in a real-world setting. Oregon StateUniversity’s School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering provides students with choices of internally(originating from within the department offering the capstone course) and externally sponsored projects and uses an assessmentsystem based on written reports and the quality of the deliverable (e.g. prototype). Providing different projects for each group ofstudents has made tracking and managing the progress of each project difficult. The large amount of work required to provide thenecessary support for students has historically fallen to faculty. However, recently, much of this work has been shifted to graduatestudent assistants. The graduate students serve as technical advisers, project managers, centralized communication hubs, and reportgraders. When compared to faculty, graduate students tend to be more accessible to students, project sponsors, and instructors;they seem more motivated to provide high quality results, they provide comparable levels of student assessments, and they areeasier to hold accountable. For many graduate students, the capstone projects are extensions of their research. Concerns overgraduate student inexperience are resolved by having a faculty member available for support as necessary. Several tiers of graduateadvisers are used and are illustrated through case studies. The first tier uses graduate students simply as report graders. The secondtier adds project advising. The third tier adds responsibility for creating a device, such as testing equipment, for the capstonestudents’ use in validating that their design meets requirements. The fourth tier includes grading, advising and responsibility toextend, as necessary, the output of the capstone students’ work to create a fully functioning deliverable for the sponsor. The fifthtier is similar to the fourth, but the project topic is a key component of the graduate students’ degree research. Through casestudies, faculty and graduate adviser grade comparisons, and content analysis from student reports, Graduate Assistants have beenobserved to be valuable contributors to an enhanced capstone course at all levels of involvement.