Nuclear Engineering Curriculum eXchange
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
With support from AE3 in 2017, this project is being led by Co-PIs Kathryn Huff and Neal Davis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It includes participants from nuclear engineering departments across the United States.
The Challenge
At this very moment, hundreds of professors in the United States are simultaneously preparing lessons on transposing a matrix. They are doing so largely without receiving feedback from one another or directly building on one another’s experience. In this way, professors spend an enormous amount of time duplicating curriculum development efforts already tackled by colleagues. What’s worse is that these efforts are rarely, if ever, reviewed by, shared with, or extended upon by peers.
The Solution
Open source software development provides an excellent example of a possible solution. These communities have mastered distributed expert collaboration, dynamic peer review, and de-duplication of effort. In open source software, developers share code revisions in online repositories, review one another’s work in small chunks, and contribute back their own improvements to the main project. So, why aren’t professors sharing their lesson materials online, collaborating on canonical lesson sets, diffing and merging similar lessons, and reviewing one another’s learning materials?
The Project
Our goal is to explore the possibility that curriculum development for university courses can operate like open source software development does. We propose a small-scale proof-of-concept for collaborative, open source, curriculum development to improve the transfer of lessons learned between instructors of the same course (either at a single university or among different campuses). This prototype collaboration will provide a template which could be adopted for collaboration among faculty teaching courses with an inherently larger scale (e.g. CS101).
License
This website and all its contents are CC-BY-4.0 licensed. So, you may share and adapt this material as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
Advanced Reactors and Fuel Cycles by ARFC Research Group is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at github.com/arfc/arfc.github.io.