Shadi Balawi

Collaborative learning in action

In this paper we introduce the Collaborative Learning Environment (CLE), a novel document creation tool, designed at the Etisalat-British Telecomm Innovation Center (EBTIC) and created to enable and enhance team-based negotiation of online, interactive writing tasks. We provide the context in which the tool has been trialed, and discuss a case study where the tool is used to gain a deep understanding into the way students thought about and implemented given tasks.

Engineering design education: Towards design thinking

This work presents an innovative interdisciplinary cornerstone engineering design-and-build course infused at the freshman level. The course promotes systematic design thinking and process using an inductive pedagogy, PBL, as the mode of delivery, in conjunction with technological tools such as robotics kits, a rapid prototyping machine, and C++ interface.

Leveraging Pedagogical Innovations for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education in the Middle East Context

Background and Purpose Over the past 20 years, educational research across all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines has revealed traits common to many of the most successful pedagogical innovations; those that feature learning contexts that enable rich peer interactions and learning tasks that present students with real-world, ill-posed problems produce the most substantial learning gains in their students. Further refinements to pedagogies in the West increasingly come from research into related “affective factors”: motivations, expectations, and self-efficacy. This state of affairs raises important questions for the developing world. Mainly, how will pedagogical innovations and educational reforms, designed for Western cultures, function when implemented in a novel context, particularly in the Middle East?

Cultivating design-thinking in Freshmen: The evolution of the KU Freshman design course

Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research (KU) is a recent start-up university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a mission focus on excellence in undergraduate engineering education. Through its leaderships vision and strategic partnerships, with institutions like Georgia Institute of Technology in the US and KAIST in South Korea, KU has embarked on a challenging experiment to internationalize and vertically integrate inquiry-based design pedagogy into all of its undergraduate degree programs in the College of Engineering. The first step in the integration has been the creation of a college-wide, “cornerstone” freshman engineering design experience that meets the needs and context of KUs diverse international student body and that uses effective pedagogical alternatives to lecture-based instruction. In this paper, we describe the research-driven evolution of the freshman design experience at KU from a discipline-specific offering within the Departments of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, to an inter-disciplinary, College-wide Freshman Engineering Design Course (FEDC).

Freshman engineering design: A new model content and pedagogy

This work presents an innovative interdisciplinary cornerstone engineering design-and-build course infused at the freshman level. The course promotes systematic design thinking and process using an inductive pedagogy, PBL, as the mode of delivery, in conjunction with technological tools such as robotics kits, a rapid prototyping machine, and C++ interface.