A community of practice to develop, teach, and disseminate learning in engineering design

This work-in-progress paper describes the initial efforts and findings from the development of a pedagogical approach to prepare pre-service teachers for teaching engineering and engaging with the community mediated through an online portal. This project incorporates the latest research on inverted classrooms and best practices for online learning in an effort to build the VILLA Community of Practice. VILLA has been designed in a manner that makes it unique in the area of instructional technology and web-based learning. This project recognizes the importance of engaging community in the teaching and learning of engineering-based content. Where VILLA is able to distinguish itself from other service-learning projects is the use of an inverted classroom format to facilitate instruction and the emphasis on modeling artifacts as a representation of student learning.