Heuristics for Digital Educators: Transforming Teaching Method with ECP-Pyramid Model in Eng-medicine Inter-disciplines

In the digital age, interdisciplinary education in Eng-medicine fields faces both challenges and opportunities. Traditional engineering courses, such as Fundamentals of Digital Electronics, are increasingly applied in the medical field. However, the integration processes of both foundational theory and clinical practice are tough. Since the one-to-one corresponding knowledges between both of them are hard to find, and the traditional engineering courses are broken down before reorganized for better integration, which interrupts the logics of the courses. Finally, students in medical majors fall between two stools. To address this issue, this article aims at presenting the ECP (Exercise-Competition-Product) pyramid model within three approaches according to the laddering technique. Guided by clinical needs, this ECP pyramid model develops three main approaches: the teachers’ guidance route, the students' learning route and the teaching evaluation route. As laddering is particularly suitable to bring out exercises, competitions, and products in the students’ route according to the difficulty, the ECP model is a good frame to design the teachers’ route and the evaluation route correspondently, since it has a systematic and hierarchical order to be followed. The ECP model is conceived in order to supply a theoretical structure capable of linking teaching methods to learning outcomes, which provides an innovative paradigm for teaching reform in the Eng-medicine interdisciplinary field.