2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Problem based learning (PBL) has been shown to be an effective teaching strategy, particularly for interdisciplinary fields such as biomedical engineering (BME). Due to the broad range of problems and disciplines within the biomedical field, it is desirable to develop and enhance problem-solving and teamwork skills early in undergraduate education. However, PBL requires a broad range of expertise and significant time investment for facilitation and feedback. These are difficult criteria to meet with small instructional teams and large introductory student enrollments. Therefore, we propose using rotating faculty facilitators to address these challenges. A preliminary execution of this strategy in an introductory BME course utilized 25 faculty and 8 graduate students from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Veterinary Medicine, and School of Medicine in a rotating facilitation schedule in addition to 2 full-time instructors and 1 graduate teaching assistant dedicated to course instruction. 98 students who are in a BME minor program were organized into 18 transdisciplinary teams and presented with three open-ended BME problems. These problems included assessing the validity and reliability of wearable health devices, benchmarking and recommending glioblastoma treatment for investment, and modeling and designing experimental studies towards development of pediatric medical devices. Currently, we aim to examine student and faculty perceptions of learning, problem-solving, and teamwork skills with the use of rotating facilitators within an introductory BME course. We will also aim to examine the influence of student population (BME major versus BME minor) on these perceptions.