Background on “Aspects of Aircraft Design and Control”
by Olivier Cleynen
One in a series of posts about an aeronautical engineering course I created this year.
So how did the course go?
All in all this has been the most demanding project of my short career. I significantly under-estimated the energy that would be required to run the sessions and projects. There are many reasons for this.
First, for many students, lectures that were built as mere reminders and overviews mostly failed to connect with existing knowledge. Signs of acquaintance or recognition were rare during the lectures, which thus took a slower pace than expected.
I cannot blame the students for this. As teachers we still have to embrace the fact that with our mandatory-presence, heavily mark-based, 35-hour a week lecture system, only a small fraction of what is taught is truly learned. It is my first university course which strongly depended on knowledge and skills acquired in other parts of the curriculum, so I mostly dealt with this problem live “on air” during the lectures.
Second, there were clearly great problems with the way students worked among themselves. I failed to anticipate rather predictable issues with time management and difficulties with keeping on track. Much worse, however, was the complete inability of most students to solve internal conflicts or move past personal relationships: the classroom was split in two un-mixable parts. Clashes thus occurred whenever we tried to create new work groups by mixing lists randomly.
Unfortunately, I could never really afford the time and energy that solving this problem would have required. This aspect remains one of the largest weak points of the course.
Third, it took time for us, I believe, to feel at ease with the format of the lectures, whose progressive, explorative slides and handouts contrast sharply with the more top-down, authoritative format that is customary within the school curriculum. Many students would never truly embrace this way of working — indeed note-taking (even underlining or highlighting) was rare all throughout the course.
Despite this, I still think the format was appropriate and a worthwhile experience for all of us.
Fourth, the projects were difficult. Most exercises in university courses are constructed as “here are A and B, find C” and they come after a lecture focused on all the quantified relationships between A, B and C. By contrast, most of these projects simply stated “evaluate C” without giving much hint as to the process (and sometimes not even giving any data). This was intentional — most real-life engineering problems have multiple solutions and do not come with an instruction manual. Most importantly, the learning process is much richer when one asks “which A and B does C depend on?”. The resulting discomfort and sometimes even disarray in the class took time and many efforts to dissipate.
Many students’ “navigation-in-the-dark” techniques (how to know whether one is on the right track, how to make solid approximations, etc) were rather weak. I read things in reports that no would-be engineer should allow him/herself to write.
In retrospect now I realize that the one-week span available to tackle each project did not provide room enough for the serene learning and experimentation that I hoped to encourage, especially within the context of a time slot deep into the semester and multiple concurring deadlines for the students. This, unfortunately, will be hard to change.
Naturally, I spent great efforts to adapt the course as these issues —all of them compounded by the English language— unfolded. The topics studied, the difficulty of the projects, all the way down to the way work groups were selected or the format of the sessions, everything from the third session onwards has been tailored to that specific class with varying degrees of success.
Finally, it should be mentioned that many aspects of the course made it stand out a little in the curriculum, which never helped. The course has been “ordered” from me and then “sold” to the students very early on (this can do nothing but needlessly raise expectations), and was then taught as it came in the midst of a financial and internal politics dispute within the school. Most naturally, just as any other teaching course, it was constructed and run with an available time budget that was much smaller than what is required to do a good job, which is about one gazillion hours. C’est la vie.
This lengthy set of remarks should provide context for truly understanding how the slides and projects that follow were constructed and used. In the next post I shall finally start publishing content =) , and once done, I will conclude briefly on the whole course.