2.1

Course Objectives

Optical System Design(OSD) is a professional course for undergraduate students at School of Optics and Photonics, Beijing Institute of Technology, CHINA. The objective of this course is to familiarize students with methods to design optical systems. Methods of how to design typical optical systems, such as telescopes, microscopes and photographic lenses will be discussed by using optical design software such as Zemax in this course.

In all, the teaching philosophy of OSD course is to train students in the following three aspects:

2.2

Learning outcomes

After completing this course, a student will be expected to get the abilities of:

2.3

Course contents

Optical System Design is traditionally a lecture-lab course which will last for 13 weeks. Following the problem-based teaching/learning methods, several optical system design projects coming from real research works will be assigned at the first stage of the class. The students are assigned to teams and each team chooses one project to implement in about ten weeks. Table 1 shows several projects we offered last year.

Table 1.

Real-world design projects

In order to implement the project design, the students will learn from the lecture part about the following contents:

The lab work will follow each lecture part. Each student is required to spent lab time to do optical system design by using optical design software.

The whole course schedule and content of each period are shown in Table 2.

Table 2.

Course schedule of Optical System Design

2.4

Problems in OSD course

Following this arrangement, Optical system design based on project-oriented principle has been implemented for 8 years. The real-world projects aroused students ‘great interest in learning.

However, problems simultaneously emerged. We found that the contradiction between the limited class hours and more contents for project-oriented learning has been getting more and more obvious. For the students, they have to allocate about 48 class hours to learn the basic principle, software and to carry out their project design. They always complain they do not have enough time to design and to communicate with teachers. For the teachers, besides the regular teaching contents, they need to give the students adequate information about each project, the feasible and practical design method, the relevant engineering background and influencing factors. At the same time, teachers should make as much time as possible for the students to perform design. An even worse condition is that the numbers of students in a class will be 40-60. Every student will have his/her own questions. It is impossible for one teacher to answer all the students’ different questions in the class. How to solve the problem brought by limited class hours? And how to meet different demands from students in the same period? These questions have led to the integration of informatization in our traditional teaching.

3.1

Informatization teaching resources

In 2016, we began to establish the online teaching resources for Optical system design course. We made a massive open online course(MOOC). Considering different demand from different learners, we put the necessary but brief topics of optical system design in the online course, including both theories and practical design methods. Each content in the topics is an independent video about 15-30 minutes. Figure 1 shows some pictures from the videos.

Figure 1.

Picture of MOOC of Optical System Design

The topics and main contents of the online lecture are shown in Table 3.

Table 3.

The topics and contents of the online lecture

Besides the topics, useful reference documents such as glass catalog are also released on the web. Students can choose what they want to learn according to their different requirements. At the same time, we opened the discussion board online. Every learner can raise their interest topics or their questions to discuss online with other learners or teachers.

3.2

Integrating Informatization into teaching

Although the MOOC includes almost all the necessary contents of optical system design, our main goal is to integrate the online resources into our regular course teaching. We modified our teaching course schedule in Table 2. The content of Introduction of optical system design software, which can be got from MOOC, was completely moved away from the class. The other lecture parts were also reduced under the support from online teaching resources.

When the teachers give lectures in class, they act just like a learning guide. They will give a brief introduction of the contents, explain the learning objectives, and ask the students to get more detailed information from MOOC after class. In this way, the saved class hours can be used to focus on the effective discussion about the design methods for the real projects, assist the students to solve independent problems in labs. In the MOOC part, students can choose any topics at any time for deep study, or for getting instructions to use software and practice typical system design. In this way, the class has been extended and developed both in times and spaces while the advantages of class teaching mode were kept simultaneously.

3.3

Students’ work and feedbacks

Following the modified course schedule, we have integrated informatization online resources with our class-lab teaching for 2 years. The results are encouraging when we saw most of our students finished their excellent design work. As beginners in optical system design area, our students has revealed their great capability of learning and real-problem solving. Some pictures of their designs and their working process are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Pictures of students’ design work and working process

We also conducted a survey among 36 students in a class for the effects of our trial at the end of the course last semester. Students were asked to do self-rating for their own ability to make a real-world project design. We also gave them a list of different teaching ways/methods we used in the course and asked them to choose the factors helping them most. Figure 3 shows the result of the survey based on students’ feedbacks.

Figure 3.

Statistics of students’ feedback

From the figure, we can see more than 80% of the students gave themselves a score over 80, which means a high achievement in this course. we can also see 83% of the students chose informatization as one of the most helpful ways in their study. Anyway, we should notice there are still a few students who did not benefit from such a blended teaching and learning mode. This will remind us to explore a better integration of different teaching ways in our next trial.