Abstract:

How can we utilize individual students’ interests, backgrounds and capabilities to build self-efficacy and achieving mastery of advanced subjects? This work is based on inductive development of advanced level courses during more than 20 years, resulting in a concept aimed towards maximizing students’ feeling of purpose and motivation.

Evolutionary learning is a concept sprung from students achieving mastery of an advanced subject through incremental and intervowen steps. The concept adheres to the principles of constructivism and constructive alignment where objectives, as intended learning outcomes, are linked to learning activities and examination.

The concept of evolutionary learning is based on an inductive development of courses in software engineering and pervasive computing, where students work both individually and in project groups on activities with increasingly challenging objectives, which also contribute to overarching objectives. The students form their own project ideas, select hardware and software as well as methods for implementation, and structure their work individually and in the project groups. Lectures, guest lectures and student seminars all contribute to weekly individual and group activities, such that outputs of activities are fed into a following activity, with weekly group meetings with the teacher to guide the progress.

The purpose is to create a learning environment that invites to and requires active participation. The diversity of the students prior knowledge and experiences enhance the collaborative learning experience, as students individually and in groups travel between concrete challenges and abstract reflection through problem- and project-based tasks. It also builds on taxonomies to build consecutive activities that step-wise increase the cognitive and knowledge dimensions of learning, while also allowing non-linear increments (for example by solving specific project issues) that may cater for unexpected but yet significant learning experiences for the students.

Evolutionary learning is built on the teacher being a guide on the side instead of a sage on the stage, with the aim to allow for a maximum degrees of freedom for students to pursue interests and goals while providing a clear framework for the learning process. This framework is composed by interwoven activities that drive the learning objectives, both individual and in groups, where weekly meetings with the teacher are of an utmost importance to guide the students towards taking incremental steps and qualitatively assess progress with the students. This illustrates the importance of consistent activation of the students, where the course design conceptualize this as 'heartbeats', meaning that students needs to keep the heartbeat going throughout the whole course.

The primary result seen is a very high student satisfaction, lately at 5.83 of 6 in course evaluations. The students feedback is that they learn a lot and feel pride of their projects, indicating that self-efficacy is also high. The evolutionary method inherently mean that they learn differently and also learn different things, the drawback is therefore naturally providing fair assessment and grading. The current development is therefore to define assessment criteria suitable for AI-tools to further enhance student self-efficacy and independence.

The result is an evolutionary learning concept, based on interwoven increments, that is mainly suitable for advanced courses.

Keywords:

Evolutionary, Incremental, Active, Experiential, Collaborative, Problem-based, Project-based, Learning, Mastery, Constructive Alignment, Methodology.