2.1.

Background

We live in a world bathed in light. We see with light, plants draw energy from light, and light is at the core of technologies from computing to surgical techniques. The field of optics concerns exploiting light to perform useful tasks.

A recent study by the Committee on Optical Science and Engineering of the National Academies of Science and Engineering entitled, “Harnessing Light, Optical Science and Engineering for the Twenty-First Century”, surveys the impending explosive growth of optics and its allied field of photonics and their unrivalled position as the next major technology to drive the economy and improve our quality of life.

The report has convincingly documented that optics is pervasive, impacting the fields of biomedicine, information technology, defense, manufacturing, energy and the environment, as well as supporting educational research activities. Light influences our lives today in new ways that we could never have imagined just a few decades ago. In the 21st century, light will play an even more significant role, enabling a revolution in worldwide fiber-optic communications, new modalities in the practice of medicine, a more effective national defense, exploration of the frontiers of science, and much more.

We are beginning to see the fruits of the scientific discoveries of the last three or four decades. The development of the laser in the 1960s produced intense light with a property never seen before on Earth: coherence. Coherent light can be directed, focused, and propagated in new ways that are impossible for incoherent light. This property of laser light has made possible fiber-optic communications, compact disks, laser surgery, and a host of other applications that add up to a multitrillion-dollar worldwide market. Applications of incoherent light abound as well, including optical lithography systems for patterning computer chips, high-resolution microscopes, adaptive optics for Earth-based astronomy, infrared sensors for everything from remote controls to night-vision equipment, and new high-efficiency lighting sources.

Although optics is pervasive in modern life, it is sometimes viewed as an orphan discipline because its power is predominantly realized in the enabling of other fields. For example, a $1B investment in photolithography gives birth to a $300B semiconductor market. Additionally, the growth of the fiber optics industry with fibers being laid continuously at the speed of a Mach 2 aircraft, about 1400 mph, empowers the information highway and fuels the burgeoning telecommunications market. Daily, in the media, we see its utility in defense, ranging from precision-guided munitions to enabling our troops to "own the night" through the use of infrared viewing devices. Traditional reconnaissance cameras are now being digitized and displayed optically. Optics and photonics are truly ubiquitous. As an ever-greater variety of commercial optical products are manufactured, the need for scientists and engineers with a broad optics education continues to rise.

While optics is essential, it typically plays a supporting role in a larger system. Central issues for this field include the following:

Optics and photonics promise to be as important in the future as electronics and computers have been in the past. They form one of the most important technology clusters identified by the Next Generation Economic Initiative (NGEI) for the state of New Mexico, and they greatly enhance the other clusters in biomedical, information technology, electronics and microsystems (nanoscience). New Mexico has long been a world leader in optical technologies and the industry is thriving with new and expanding companies. Photonics will support the further development of Kirtland Air Force Base in the directed energy arena (e.g. lasers, etc.) and in its growing role as the tri-service Department of Defense prime R&D center. It is worth pointing out that the NGEI initiative has amalgamated and is stimulating further growth of already burgeoning New-Mexico-based industrial and educational establishments in optics.

2.2.

Existing local strengths

As indicated earlier, the proposed B.S. degree program will fill the last educational niche in optical science and engineering and respond to increasing local workforce needs for qualified technicians, engineers and scientists. It will be greatly assisted and complemented by important resources and time-honored programs that are already in place. The most important of these unique resources are the following:

The research and educational theme of the CORE project is centered on optical imaging and spectroscopic techniques with high spatial and temporal resolution and their application to physical, chemical, and biological problems. In addition to the current curricula in their respective departments, IGERT students take a set of cross-disciplinary courses designed specifically for the program. The IGERT fellows will be offered internships in the local optics industry, in national laboratories, and abroad to widen their horizons and to introduce career opportunities. A weekly seminar series will provide the students with training in technical writing and in presentations of their research in a multi-disciplinary environment. An important emphasis of the CORE program is on mentoring of undergraduate students by the CORE students, to help foster team spirit and leadership skills and to recruit, retain, and involve undergraduates, in particular those from underrepresented minorities, in research. Students enrolled in the new optics B.S. degree will be able to benefit from such mentoring.

Each of the educational initiatives described above was taken independently to solve a specific organization's need. But they have all come together beautifully, in an almost seamless manner, to create, to a large degree, a well articulated educational ladder from which students can exit and enter the workforce at different rungs, based on their needs, ability, interest, and employment opportunities. This education ladder in its entirety is unique and places New Mexico in a leading position in the nation. As illustrated in Fig. 1, the new B.S. in Optical Science and Engineering degree is the last remaining rung that needs to be added to this ladder to make it complete.

Fig. 1.

Education ladder for careers in optics and photonics – present status.

3.1.

Freshman program

Throughout the USA, a dangerous trend toward shrinking engineering enrollments, noted already in the early nineties, poses a potentially serious problem for American industry and society. The annual engineering graduation rate has decreased by roughly 20% in the last decade, while the number of engineering jobs has risen by ~25-30% [Felder 1998]. The decline in the graduation rate can be attributed to both the increasing difficulty of attracting high school graduates into engineering and high attrition rates of enrolled engineering students. Most engineering schools have undertaken major recruitment efforts to address the first problem, targeting especially women and minorities. However, since freshman enrollment is heavily influenced by factors out of the university's control, these efforts have a limited potential for success [Heckel 1996]. A much more effective way to improve graduation rates is therefore to develop methods for improved retention of engineering freshmen.

Considering the strong academic records of most students who choose to go into engineering, high rates of attrition are truly alarming. A monumental study of nearly 25,000 students at over 300 institutions established that only 43% of the engineering freshmen went on to graduate in engineering [Astin 1993]. Similar results were obtained in a more limited study of 1,151 engineering freshmen at Iowa State University [Moller-Wong 1997]. After five years, 32% of the cohort graduated in engineering and 13% were still enrolled, for a probable eventual graduation rate between 40% and 45%.

With these statistics at hand, the issue of retention must lie at the heart of any new engineering program. A frequently encountered explanation of high engineering-student attrition rates is that most of those who leave lack the academic ability to cope with the rigors of the discipline. However, studies have shown that this interpretation is incorrect, with little difference in academic performance between students that choose to stay in engineering and those that choose to leave [Besterfield-Sacre 1997]. The true explanation appears to involve a complex set of factors, including students' attitudes toward engineering, their self-confidence levels, and the quality of their interactions with instructors and peers, along with their aptitude for engineering.

The present structure of freshman engineering curricula at UNM has very little engineering content, which essentially reduces the engineering degree programs to three years, with the first-year’s filter focusing on prerequisites in calculus, physics, and chemistry. We plan to utilize the positive experience of NSF-funded Engineering Education Coalitions (EECs), where even the first-year students learn engineering within a connected intellectual and social context. Significantly improved retention among students who elect to take the first-year engineering courses at the universities participating in the EECs [Felder 1998] shows that early offering of subject-oriented courses is very effective in building community and social support that are vital as students go through a challenging curriculum. This is consistent with earlier findings that students' attitudes toward engineering and their confidence levels were strongly related to their classroom experience [Astin 1993]. Compared to majors in other fields, engineering majors were much more dissatisfied with the quality of instruction they received in college and with their overall college experience. Apart from course content, the prevalent model of instruction in engineering, with its extensive reliance on lecturing and individual work and norm-referenced grading (curving), played a major role in this high dissatisfaction level and therefore in student attrition. Many educational scholars have since recommended establishing an alternative instructional environment in engineering curricula that includes the use of active and cooperative learning tools and a variety of other pedagogical methods designed to accommodate different learning styles [Astin 1993], [Meyers 1993], [McKeachie 1994].

Based on these data, we are developing an innovative first-year optical science and engineering curriculum incorporating the following pedagogical theories of the Foundation Coalition:

We are designing first-year courses with optics and photonics-based real-life project content, where students will be working and learning in teams. This will help them confront the difficulties they may encounter, as well as learn about the advantages of participating in a team effort. They will learn why optical scientists and engineers need to learn physics, mathematics, chemistry, ethics, economics, and social implications of technology, and they will make better connections between these subjects and the practice of engineering.

3.2.

Active and cooperative learning

Research has shown consistently that traditional lecture methods, in which professors talk and students listen, dominate college and university classrooms [King 1993]. According to a study published in 1987, 89% of U.S. physics and mathematics professors lectured as a mode of instruction [Thielens 1987]. The greatest advantage of lectures in the opinion of teaching faculty is the ability to share information with a large number of students [Gage 1998]. However, a vast body of literature shows that students must do more than just listen to truly learn [Craik 1972], [Poppenhagen 1982], [Chickering 1987], [Bolles 1988], [Sutherland 1996]. A schematic illustration of this statement is represented in now classic “cone of experience”, shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

Edgar Dale’s “Cone of Learning”, illustrating how effectiveness of teaching improves with an increased student participation. After: The Foundation Coalition, http://www.foundationcoalition.org

In active learning, students are engaged in various activities beyond just listening. They are involved in dialog, debate, writing, and problem solving, as well as higher-order thinking, e.g., analysis, synthesis, and evaluation [Bonwell 1991]. Use of these techniques in the classroom is vital because of their powerful impact upon students' learning. For example, several studies have shown that students prefer strategies promoting active learning to traditional lecture. Furthermore, some cognitive research has shown that a significant number of students have learning and cognitive styles best served by pedagogical techniques other than lecturing. On the other hand, it should be noted that the connection between student preferences and actual performance when provided with their preferred method of learning has not been well-established and requires further research [Jonassen 1993].

Classroom discussion is preferable to lectures if the objectives are to promote long-term retention of information, to motivate students toward further learning, to allow students to apply information in new settings, and to develop students' thinking and analytical skills [McKeachie 1986]. However, in order to achieve these goals faculty must be knowledgeable about alternative techniques and strategies for questioning and discussion [Hyman 1980] and must create a supportive intellectual and emotional environment that encourages students to take risks [Lowman 1984]. Hence, proper preparation of teaching faculty through workshops will be necessary. Further discussion of the need for faculty workshops and its planned implementation is presented in Section 3.6.

The published literature on alternatives to traditional classroom presentations provides a rich menu of different approaches faculty can readily add to their repertoire of instructional skills. Specific techniques that will be considered in order to incorporate active learning in the new optical science and engineering curriculum include:

Cooperative learning is the instructional use of small groups in which students work together to maximize their own and each other’s learning. If instituted properly, it can produce higher achievement, more positive relationships among students, and healthier psychological adjustment than do competitive or individualistic experiences. Five essential components must be present for small-group learning to be truly cooperative [Johnson 1991]:

Among various cooperative learning methods, we will explore whole class and group discussions [Gage 1998], peer teaching and collaborative group learning, and role-playing or simulations [Burden 1998], as well as informal cooperative strategies such as Think-Pair Share [Johnson 1991]. In particular, we note that students working in small groups in engineering laboratory courses were more likely to be able to generalize from specific observations, were superior at applying concepts to new situations, and had a greater ability to critically analyze what they read and synthesize information from a variety of sources [Collier 1980]. In general, students working in groups appeared to have increases in the attributes of self-directed learning and in obtaining relevant help for facilitating learning when compared with students in lecture-only courses [Poppenhagen 1982].

According to [Bonwell 1991], previous classroom initiatives and written materials about active learning have been too isolated and fragmented. The resulting pedagogical efforts have therefore lacked coherence, and the goal of interactive classrooms has remained unfulfilled. To a large extent, these statements are still true, especially when applied to UNM’s undergraduate instruction in engineering. We believe that the Bridges for Engineering Education framework adopted for the new degree program offers a unique opportunity for a coordinated efforts of optics faculty, educational researchers, and academic administrators, to make real the promise of active and cooperative learning.

3.3.

Curriculum integration

The new curriculum will include elements of many disciplines, utilizing the ubiquity of optics as enabling technology in various fields, as well as its relation to the economy, manufacturing, ethics, and similar disciplines. A good example to follow has been recently set by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the United States Air Force Academy, where a capstone senior level integration course was developed [Jenkins 2002]. The course blends technical aspects of engineering design with construction and realistic issues of modern society. Technical designs accomplished by the students prior to taking the capstone course form the basis of the capstone design experience. The students review the technical design and prepare the project for construction through incorporating engineering standards and considering realistic issues, such as economics, constructability, and environmental aspects, as well as ethical, health and safety constraints. The students prepare a final design report and make an oral presentation to an interdisciplinary panel of engineering faculty. This capstone course is the culmination of a total integration experience, which includes a hands-on field engineering course, and two years of a rigorous engineering design curriculum.

3.4.

Integration of research and education

The involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in research is an important and powerful educational tool. In a research setting, technical discussions between students and senior investigators, or among students, expose the student to knowledge that goes well beyond the material covered in the classroom. This allows the student to “try out” ideas that have been learnt in class and to contribute to the generation of new knowledge. In addition, the research environment provides the student with an important opportunity for professional development through interactions at conferences, meetings with program managers, and internships in government laboratories or industry. The skills of communication and networking that are learnt during these interactions are vital for today’s graduates.

The new program will benefit from the existing vibrant research in optical science and engineering conducted in both EECE and Physics & Astronomy Departments as well as in the Center for High Technology Materials, with its strong focus on photonics and sensors – areas important to homeland defense. A graduate mentorship program will be established, whereby undergraduate students will be working on research projects in a team environment, under direct supervision of graduate students. In addition, students enrolled in this program will be able to participate in UNM’s Co-op program, placing them in local industry or in national laboratories for summer internships. Both these mentorship and internship programs will greatly benefit form a similar methodology adopted for integration of graduate research, education, and training under the just begun NSF/IGERT cross-disciplinary project CORE (see Section 2.2) that stresses the role of optics in physics, biology, chemistry, and electrical engineering applications.

In addition to research experience in optics and photonic, the new program will provide research opportunities for education students who will be able to conduct research on novel teaching and assessment methods as they become implemented in this program.

3.5.

Distance education

Distance education is an important instructional tool well suited to overcoming barriers of time and space. It is an effective means of facilitating learning, especially useful for reaching those unable to attend conventional university classes due to time or geographic constraints. The new program will aim at increasing the number of web-based and ITV course offerings, especially at the lower-end (first two years) of the curriculum.

Development of an undergraduate curriculum with a strong distance learning component is particularly important for the University of New Mexico with its branch campuses in Gallup, Valencia, Los Alamos, and Taos, extending as far as 150 miles away from its main campus in Albuquerque. In addition, UNM operates distance learning sites in Farmington and Zuni, as well as the two Diné College sites in Shiprock and Crownpoint. All of these sites either expect to have or already have ‘smart classrooms’ in place to teach distance education courses. Several are also hooked up to the access grid at the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center, so that multiple sites can be rapidly reflected on the same projector screen.

3.6.

Overcoming the barriers

An essential part of the planning process for the new undergraduate curriculum in optical science and engineering will be an identification of the obstacles to its implementation and a design of strategies to overcome these barriers.

Calls for a reform of undergraduate engineering education are not new. Yet, most teaching faculty at UNM have not bothered to seriously consider and embrace them. Part of the proposed planning process will be to conduct surveys that will help to identify and understand barriers to instructional change at UNM. These surveys will be prepared and evaluated by the College of Education participants.

Some of the existing barriers may be subjective, such as the powerful influence of educational tradition, faculty self-perceptions and self-definition of roles, the discomfort and anxiety that change creates, the limited incentives for faculty to change, and the perception of a high risk associated with the employment of active learning. There are perceived risks that students may not wish to participate, may not be able to use higher-order thinking, or learn sufficient content, that instructors will feel a loss of control, lack necessary skills, or be criticized for teaching in unorthodox ways. Other factors may be more objective, for example limited class time; a possible increase in preparation time; the potential difficulty of using active learning in large classes; and a lack of needed materials, equipment, or resources. While faculty workshops may address the subjective domain, the objective obstacles need to be clearly identified, and plans for their removal in the implementation stage will be formulated. This process is especially important since system and infrastructure upgrades would likely be required to adopt the curricular reform.

As part of our strategy towards overcoming the barriers, we intend to fully utilize the resources available through the NSF-funded Engineering Education Coalitions, focusing on faculty workshops led by invited Coalition instructors as a way of improving the teaching effectiveness of the optics faculty. In particular, we plan to hold a series of monthly workshops on:

These workshops will also be open to other engineering faculty, as the techniques involved are clearly of general interest and can be utilized in other engineering disciplines. Of critical importance is participation of non-engineering faculty who teach elective courses that engineering students take.

3.7.

Outcome assessment, evaluation, and feedback

The planning process and especially the subsequent implementation of the new B.S. in Optical Science and Engineering degree will provide a fertile ground for identifying and pursuing instructional and cognitive science research problems. This will not only assist in overcoming initial barriers, but will also help to guide future practices in the classroom and to develop approaches tailored to the unique population mix of New Mexico. In particular, we envisage rigorous studies on effectiveness of active and cooperative learning strategies that will explore the impact of important student characteristics, such as their ethnic background, gender, learning styles, and stage of intellectual development. Among other factors, we plan to examine in the implementation stage the differences in performance and attitudes between students from different ethnic groups (with emphasis on Native American and Hispanic students), from different community backgrounds (rural, small town, suburban, and urban), different family backgrounds (level and type of education of parents), and between male and female students. Background information on the studied cohort will be recorded, including demographic data, SAT and AP scores, grade-point averages and grades in selected freshman and subsequent courses, and scores on both the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI), a personality inventory based on Jung's theory of psychological types, the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory® (LASSI), an instrument that assesses students' test-taking skills and strategies, motivation to learn, and anxiety levels, and the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) derived from a program of research at the University of Michigan led by Paul Pintrich which has Motivational Scales and Learning Strategies Scales. The data will also include statistics on persistence in the optical science and engineering curriculum, and students' self-evaluations and reactions to their educational experiences. A comparison group will consist of students taking the traditional EE and P&A curricula, as well as optical science and engineering students taking traditional lecture courses. The results of this research will be disseminated in journals widely read by both education and engineering faculty.

Tom Angelo, the director of the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) Assessment Forum, formulated the following useful definition of assessment [Angelo 1995]: Assessment is the ongoing process aimed at understanding and improving student learning. It involves making our expectations explicit and public; setting appropriate criteria and high standards for learning quality; systematically gathering, analyzing and interpreting evidence to determine how well performance matches those expectations and standards; and then using the resulting information to document, explain, and improve performance.

Active learning itself can be used as an effective assessment tool. Most post-secondary faculty are familiar only with summative assessment, i.e., a formal assessment in which student performance is assigned a grade that denotes a specific level of proficiency or achievement. Summative assessment typically translates into one or two major tests and a final. In recent years, however, the concept of assessment has been broadened to include formative classroom assessment, which comprises informal assessment techniques designed primarily to improve teaching and learning in a more systematic fashion [Angelo 1993]. This ungraded assessment, coupled with active learning, can be a powerful tool for transforming a passive classroom into one filled with active participants. For example, it can be used in conjunction with mini-lectures to verify whether students understand a key point or concept. Using a think-pair-share approach [Bonwell 1997] can be particularly effective to stimulate classroom discussion on a subject.

Most traditional classroom tests focus on the assessment of knowledge. Skill development has been usually perceived as something that should be done outside the classroom - in the laboratory, by solving homework problems, by writing papers, etc. Experience suggests, however, that students need explicit coaching on developing skills inside the classroom prior to extending those skills outside the classroom. For example, to develop problem-solving skills, students can be asked to work out problems illustrative of the day's material. Such exercises allow students to develop skill proficiency in a safe environment and allow instructors to determine areas that need further explication. In this way, skill assessment can be combined with an enhanced effectiveness of instruction.

3.8.

Development of new instructional materials

An important outcome of the strong interaction between the optics and education faculty and graduate students will be a series of new textbooks created in the process of development and implementation of the new program. In the past, standard textbooks have focused on a presentation of technical content accompanied by problems to be solved by students at home. Solution manuals and computer software were the only additional materials the instructors could expect to have. We envisage a novel model for creation of modern textbooks written jointly by the faculty teaching optical science and engineering courses and the experts from the College of Education who will assist in preparing unique instructional aids. These additional materials will focus on specific approaches teachers can take to introduce active/cooperative learning in their classrooms, and will contain examples of formative tests which could be used during the instruction, all in the specific context of a particular textbook. This approach will ensure the widest possible dissemination and transfer of the new knowledge acquired by the UNM faculty to other universities and colleges, and will contribute significantly to a wider use of effective teaching styles.

The new instructional aid materials will utilize the concept of abilities-based education [Bonwell 1997], with three essential components of ability: knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Evaluation criteria to be communicated to students prior to administration of the tests will also be listed. These evaluation criteria will be developed empirically in UNM classrooms using active participation by the students. Recommendations will also be included on how to train students to take part in a formative assessment of their colleagues.

4.1.

Coordination with community colleges

The new degree program requires further study in order to develop effective articulation between the Associate Degree programs at New Mexico’s community colleges and those entering with advanced placement in a baccalaureate degree program. For example, the level of math proficiency may need to be bolstered to enable the ATVI students who are articulating with UNM to move smoothly into the calculus-based science and mathematics courses required at UNM.

Programs of study in basic optics are already available at the Crownpoint Institute of Technology and Southwestern Polytechnic Institute, and would require the addition of a few classes to complete their Associates Degree level program.

4.2.

Improvement of engineering content in K-12 education

UNM will work together with Sandia National Laboratories and Albuquerque Public Schools to further expand outreach programs, beyond the Photonics Academy at West Mesa High School (see Fig. 1). For example, photonics will be included in the program of Advanced Technology Academy at the Albuquerque High School. Further efforts aimed at enriching the engineering content of K-12 education will be coordinated jointly by UNM, ATVI, and Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories.

It is expected that close collaboration between the optics and education faculty will result in development of approaches that encourage current and future teachers to use stimulating problems based on optical science and engineering that illustrate real-world applications of mathematics and science. Such real-world examples are expected to increase the level of pre-college student interest and motivation, leading to an increased enrollment in engineering degree programs in general, and in the new B.S. in Optical Science and Engineering program in particular.

4.3.

Teacher education

An essential part of improved engineering content in K-12 education is teacher preparation. Currently, there is a vast shortage of teachers and laboratory professional to serve the emerging needs of New Mexico’s schools and national laboratories. The new program will create new opportunities for increased interactions between engineering and education students and faculty, with the goal of enhancing the engineering and engineering technology content of the programs of study of pre-service teachers and general education majors, as well as developing new strategies for improved pedagogy and evaluation in undergraduate engineering and engineering technology.

There are presently little to no interactions between engineering and education in teacher licensure programs. An important direction that will be pursued by the participating College of Education faculty is preparation of a course for educators on the aspects of engineering in the K-12 setting.

4.4.

Optics and Photonics Education Summit and a follow-on workshop

The unique optics and photonics educational environment illustrated in Fig. 1 can and should be expanded to include more K-12 schools, more community colleges, and more university campuses. We are organizing an Optics and Photonics Education Summit that will be devoted to further strengthening of optics and photonics education in New Mexico at all levels of the educational ladder (cf. Fig. 1).

In a small-and-diverse-population, large-area state such as New Mexico, collaboration, cooperation, and communication are of extreme importance to maximize the benefit from the planners and efforts of community drivers. New Mexico has selected optics and photonics to be one of its prime future economic drivers, without negative effects upon its cherished and unique character. The Summit will allow for identifying and leveraging meaningful resources, while calling attention to this emerging field. According to NSF, New Mexico ranks near, if not at the top of the nation in the ratio of R&D expenditures to gross state product – which means to many that technology for all the right reasons is more important to the well being of this state than any other. An Education Summit bringing the educational and political leaders together will help ensure and strengthen our continued technical enterprise leadership, as well as demonstrating to others our unique approach to educational requirements of an emerging-technology-based economy, especially as it applies to workforce development.

Based on the educational as well as socioeconomic issues identified at the Summit, we plan to organize a smaller, more focused follow-on workshop at UNM, concentrating on the new B.S. program. The main purpose of this workshop will be to develop actual strategies and tactics to fold in the entire range of such mostly external, often highly interdependent factors into a viable plan for the new degree program.

Our experience with the recently approved M.S. degree in Optical Science and Engineering has confirmed the efficacy of a consensus-building approach in the larger community of optics professionals throughout the State. The two-step approach we propose here, of holding a broad exploratory educational summit followed by a more dedicated and focused workshop, will not only achieve such consensus, but also lead to the development of a concrete degree proposal.