Grant to fund bioengineering education 

The National Science Foundation has selected Vanderbilt as the lead university for a nearly $10 million multi-institution grant that will utilize the combined expertise of the Vanderbilt School of Engineering and the Peabody College Learning Technology Center to develop bioengineering educational technologies and curricula for the new millennium. 

The bioengineering industry has produced such cutting edge technologies as pacemakers, external and implanted defibrillators that monitor and detect life-threatening arrhythmia and administer defibrillation shocks, and artificial kidney machines. 

“The research and educational products to be developed by the new NSF center will impact engineering education across all domains,” Dean of the School of Engineering Kenneth F. Galloway said. “Not only will technology be adapted in new ways to teach bioengineering concepts successfully and efficiently, but the center’s products will help make new bioengineering course material accessible to all engineers.”

“This grant provides a unique opportunity for Vanderbilt to combine faculty strengths in learning science and technology here at Peabody with the outstanding research knowledge in bioengineering in a cutting-edge effort to develop effective learning and teaching technologies,” Dean of Peabody College Camilla Benbow said. 

Galloway credits Thomas R. Harris, professor and chair of Biomedical Engineering and the new center director, and John D. Bransford, Centennial Professor of Psychology and Education, with creating the partnership that will anchor the center’s work. 

“The synergy between our strong research and teaching base in bioengineering and the nationally recognized expertise of the Learning Technology Center in using technology in education gives Vanderbilt a unique capability to help advance bioengineering,” Galloway said. 

“The fact that the field of
bioengineering is changing with great
speed makes it especially important to
prepare students for lifelong learning.
Technology will play a key role in
helping us achieve this goal.” 

—John Bransford

“One essentially has to write a textbook
every time you teach a bioengineering
course at the present time. That’s very
labor intensive.” 

—Tom Harris

The grant, which provides $2 million per year for five years with the potential to extend it an additional three years, is expected to provide: 

Bioengineering lecture and course support material on levels ranging from middle school to post-graduate study;  Undergraduate and graduate bioengineering curricula;  Development of new teaching technologies, as well as adaptation of old ones, to achieve the goals of knowledge, skill and reasoning acquisition in bioengineering;  Organized information about the various domains of bioengineering, presented in modular form, that can be digitally accessed by a variety of professors, teachers, researchers and practicing engineers;  Functioning technology for the delivery of bioengineering teaching materials throughout the world, using both synchronous and asynchronous networks;  Development of virtual laboratories, demonstrations and other support materials;  Development of assessment methods which allow critical evaluation of the effectiveness of learning technologies and methods in bioengineering. 

Harris, principal investigator of the grant, said that while the scientific and engineering literature of bioengineering is vast, tested teaching materials are scarce and unsatisfactory. The field is still relatively young, rapidly changing and undergoing significant growth.
“Part of the problem in getting a usable textbook is that you may like half of it but not the other half,” Harris said. “One essentially has to write a textbook every time you teach a bioengineering course at the present time. That’s very labor intensive.” Harris says there is a nationwide need to synthesize and integrate the knowledge in bioengineering and make it available digitally, in module units, to professors, researchers and professional engineers as well as middle school and high school teachers. They could then pick and choose the modules that best fit their needs. 

“This project came at just the right time for those of us in the learning sciences,” explained Bransford, co-director of the Learning Technology Center. “Several prominent National Academy of Science reports have synthesized what is known about human learning and how to use technology to enhance it. These reports provide a strong starting point for strengthening the learning opportunities for bioengineering students.” Bransford noted two additional reasons this project is particularly exciting.

“First, it gives us an opportunity to collaborate with other colleagues in the learning sciences—especially those at Northwestern. They are a terrific group whose work we know well, but we have not had the chance to pursue joint projects with them. The bioengineering project will make that possible. There are also learning specialists at the other universities who have a wealth of knowledge and experience. We only met some of them briefly, but we are excited about the opportunity to collaborate.

“Second,” Bransford added, “it has been an absolute pleasure to work with the bioengineering faculty and students. They are extraordinarily bright, energetic and creative. Our interactions with them have been exciting. The fact that the field of bioengineering is changing with great speed makes it especially important to prepare students for lifelong learning. Technology will play a key role in helping us achieve this goal.”

A lot of planning went into the grant proposal. “When the NSF released its call for proposals in the spring of 1998, we asked ourselves: Can we pull together the expertise in bioengineering and learning technology to tackle this mammoth project,” Harris said. 

After meeting with Bransford, Engineering Professor John Bourne, director of the Center for Innovation Engineering education, and others, the answer became clear. It was a resounding “yes.” 

Harris identified and made the contacts at the partner institutions. He chose Northwestern because, like Vanderbilt, it has a major undergraduate, as well as graduate, program in bioengineering and also has an excellent school of education. The University of Texas, also a strong center in bioengineering research and teaching, provides the component of a major state university with multiple campuses. Texas is interested in distance learning and can disseminate information to campuses that have substantial minority enrollment and are part of its state system. Harvard and MIT have a joint program that is one of the leading research and graduate programs in bioengineering. They offer particular strength in graduate work and in their relationship with the Harvard Medical School. 

“These universities give us a variation in constituency and knowledge base,” Harris said. “All of these institutions have faculty that are expert in all the areas of bioengineering but all offer a slightly different emphasis.” 

The new NSF bioengineering education center will have both industrial and practice partnerships. These organizations will advise the center on the relevance of educational materials and will provide resources to the center, including internships for students, equipment, software and access to specialized facilities. These partners will also be test sites for continuing education materials developed by the center. The initial group of such partners are Abbott Laboratories, Dell Computer Corporation, Gold Standard Multimedia, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, National Instruments, Health Stream Media, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pathogenesis Corporation.

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