Collaborative Instruction and Team Based Project Learning - An Effective Strategy to Conduct Technology Education

Collaborative instruction is a teaching model that involves multiple instructors for a common set of educational goals, which can integrate the strengths and shared interests of faculty members with different expertise and research focuses.Just in time teaching for the project provides information for instructors to better understand how students learn in classroom.In this paper we present the practices and effectiveness of the collaborative instruction and just in time teaching pedagogy that we apply in the context of engineering technology education.We show how collaborative efforts have been made by multiple faculty members to immediately teach students useful skills and guide them in the understanding of engineering design principles in the area of embedded systems.With the combination of these methods, students with minimal math or programming backgrounds were able to independently initiate, design and develop technically challenging projects for a nationwide competition.One of the team projects "Elderly Independence" won the third place award in the USA 2014 Digilent Design Competition.This embedded digital system was designed and implemented by using the VHDL hardware programming language and programmable FPGAs.Our classroom experience indicated that collaborative instruction combined with just in time teaching of the basics for contest oriented projects stimulated students' interest in learning engineering design principles.Students demonstrated significantly faster development of engineering skills compared to those who followed the more traditional instructional approach.