Choosing an Optimal Pedagogy: A Design Approach

New or experienced engineering educators may have a sincere desire to enhance student learning but not be sure how to approach this, even if they have done their homework and reviewed the myriad of pedagogies presented in the literature. Indeed one may choose from a wide array of well promoted, learning enhancing pedagogies, such as active learning, cooperative learning, and problem-based learning, but, in practice, a basic question of how and what teaching method to choose still remains unclear. In this paper, we address this question and consider the problem of choosing an optimal pedagogy as an open-ended design task. By casting the ambiguous selection process as that of design, the feasibility of applying common design analysis techniques (e.g., pair-wise comparison chart and decision matrix) becomes apparent. By having a prescribed set of assessment factors, an optimal pedagogy may be arrived at in the same way as how existing analysis techniques can be applied to arrived at a ´best´ design out of a number of potentially viable options