The Occam's Typewriter Irregulars

Our studies coordinator, Andrea, had a busy summer interviewing the people who hire our graduates; she talked to industry representatives in both management and research and development roles, as well as human resources personnel, from a wide range of different companies with different specialities. Now that we are all back from Summer travels, and have survived the first week of the new academic year, we spent our latest curriculum team meeting poring over her findings.

First of all, I should say that we were enormously encouraged and grateful to find so many very busy people willing to donate their time to help us with our curriculum revision process; it’s clear that the professional community genuinely cares about our program and our graduates. We were a little bit flattered too, at their enthusiasm for the technical and scientific competencies of our graduates. All of the employers emphasized the excellent reputation of our institute, the rigorous education in fundamentals that our graduates are renowned for, their extensive practical and laboratory skills and the “swiss quality” of our brand.  So far, so good.

I was personally astonished, though, at their astonishment that we would want to change anything. In fact many employers even seemed somewhat concerned that we might be about to really mess things up. I learned that many aspects of our program that we consider a bit unmodern  — “traditional” materials science such as empirical processing methods, or the division of knowledge into materials “classes” rather than cross-cutting concepts — are considered strengths. And that the details of the new stuff that we had planned to teach our students — environmental issues and sustainability for example — are not terribly important to our employers, and certainly not at the expense of a rigorous training in basics. Maybe the time for post-modernism in Materials education has not yet come?

When pressed further, however, the topic of skills beyond the technical (the german phrase for this — nicht-fachliche Kompetenzen — is fabulous) came up repeatedly. The importance of teamwork, communication and presentation skills, industrial internship experience, goal-setting and self-learning, and so on. These are certainly competencies that we plan to address with project-based learning approaches. Inter-cultural competencies and language skills were also mentioned; it will be challenging to incorporate these into the time available for the degree, assuming that my North-of-England heritage and dialect is not what they had in mind.

The criticism that I am struggling with most, which came up repeatedly, is that our graduates are too picky, in that they expect work that is too interesting and salaries that are too high. Now while we of course don’t want to be releasing cohorts of arrogant prima donnas into the workforce (and as a newcomer to Switzerland I can objectively say that swissness is antithetical to primadonnaness), a bit of pickiness in terms of how interesting one’s work should be strikes me as something we should be trying to nurture rather than discourage. I can wish nothing better for our graduates than that they find stimulating and interesting ways to contribute to society. And I see no downside to our women graduates in particular (finally) negotiating aggressively for their starting salaries. But that is a subject for another very long discussion…

Or

Whenever you have a hard problem to solve, check first whether someone has already solved it.

Not wanting to reinvent the wheel (and hoping to benefit from the hard work of others) we decided to take a look at the processes used by other Materials departments to introduce project-based learning into their programs. Feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed after vacation (recommendation: If you missed last month’s total eclipse of the sun, absolutely  go and see the next one) we started analyzing the data generously collected by my colleague Markus Niederberger over the summer.

I recommend this exercise to anyone feeling a bit disenchanted with higher education: The worldwide level of effort, enthusiasm and rigor that is being invested in developing stimulating programs to best facilitate student learning dispels any skepticism regarding the commitment of University Professors to teaching. Perhaps not surprisingly there is tremendous creativity too, with a wide range of approaches and implementations designed to accommodate different student backgrounds and to meet different educational goals.

Perhaps the most dramatic is the approach of University of Twente, which has adopted an entirely modular curriculum structure they call the Twente Educational Model, or TOM (because “Educational” starts with an “O” in Dutch). Each module includes a variety of teaching and learning formats, technical subjects and assessment modes, has a project about a real-world problem at its core and follows a student-driven learning approach in which students reflect on where they need faculty input in order to meet the learning objectives. It sounds absolutely fabulous (there are some nice “personal interest” stories here) and in my next life I will definitely choose this program for my own studies. (At least as long as there’s some plate tectonic activity in the meantime to arrange for some better mountains nearby). It’s on a bit of a grander scale than we can take on in our current curriculum revision — to be effective I think it needs an entire institutional change — but maybe our DMATL efforts can provide a step in this direction for the ETH.

Most helpful for us is the experience of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, which adopted a similar approach to that which is emerging in our own discussions, and did a tremendous public service by thoroughly documenting it. (See for example R. N. Savage, K. C. Chen and L. Vanasupa, Integrating project-based learning throughout the undergraduate engineering curriculum, Journal of STEM Education 8, 1 (2007) and K. C. Chen et al., Creating a project-based curriculum in materials engineering, Journal of Materials Education 31, 37 (2009).) At Cal Poly an increasing fraction of credits is spent on projects in each academic year, starting with a small-scale community service project (for example the design and implementation of a solar water system for a local elementary school) in the first year and culminating with an industry-sponsored design project before graduation.  The projects are balanced with traditional lecture & laboratory learning activities and assessments. Their list of ongoing challenges — designing suitable projects, assessment techniques, team teaching, resisting overstuffing the curriculum and so on — is a bit daunting but their conclusion that these are outweighed by the benefits is reassuring.

And there are many other approaches too — ranging from the largely extracurriculuar Center for Engineering Innovation and Design at Yale University for example, to an almost entirely project-based syllabus at Olin College of Engineering. Our challenge now is to figure out which combination of approaches will work best in the ETH context. How best to help young people who have grown up in the unique Swiss social, cultural and economic environment to become the best possible citizens for Zürich, Switzerland, Europe and the world…

Well, here we are at the end of our promised series of “The Materials Scientist, Who is She?” workshops. Before I give you the answer to our eternal question, first let me tell you what worked well with the logistics: We proposed three different dates and let the colleagues choose which to attend; this was a good plan because there was a natural mix of technical expertise and personalities and it kept the discussion groups to a manageable size. We set a strict time limit (2.5 hours) for each session so that the end was always in sight. And we had a good espresso machine in the discussion room.

Beforehand I attended a “Facilitating meetings and workshops” training course and I practiced some of my new tricks on my colleagues. My favorite turned out to be the “silent sticky note” technique, in which everyone writes down ideas on sticky notes which are then stuck to the wall and rearranged in silence by the team before any discussion is allowed. This approach was absolute torment for some of us who almost exploded with the desire to start arguing immediately, but certainly gave the quieter participants more of a voice than usual. Here’s an example of the ideas that got organized into a “Structure – Properties – Processing” block.

We structured the discussion around “Knowledge” — all the stuff that a materials scientist should know, “Soft skills” — the useful bits needed for survival in a professional environment, and “Practical skils” — labs, equipment and so on, all the while keeping in mind the question “What will we require for admission to our MS program in 2030?” We generated many new ideas (and reinforced many old ones) and even one of my more ornery colleagues declared the process to be not a complete waste of his time. All in all rather positive.

So positive that the piles of cheerfully colored sticky notes crammed full of creative ideas became high. Very high. We decided to make an executive summary which was eleven pages long. In small font. We agreed not to panic. And slowly, over the course of a few meetings of the core project team a structure started to emerge…

Now we find ourselves grouped into three “themes” which we are fleshing out into detailed profiles:

1. Designing of Materials: Given a bunch of atoms, how does their arrangement determine the properties of a material.
2. How do we characterize and model materials?
3. Designing with Materials: Given a particular application, how do we choose or make the appropriate material?

Not rocket science I guess, but someone else gets to design that curriculum…

Were there any surprises? Well, we held a dedicated workshop for our students hoping they would be more innovative without the constraint of us old folks being around, but they were actually the most conservative, with their suggestions largely reflecting our current curriculum. Perhaps we should not be surprised by that though — certainly when I was an undergraduate I thought that our Professors had some kind of profound perspective that was determining what we were learning and why. A big surprise though was the almost complete convergence regarding what the defining aspects of our field are, with all of us basically agreeing with each other on the core aspects. And that, as any veteran of faculty meetings will agree, is a truly remarkable outcome.

Like many academics I am woefully untrained for many aspects of my job. My route to my position, which I think is a fairly common trajectory, was to spend much of my life learning how to solve other people’s science problems, then to go on to find that I have a knack for generating interesting problems of my own. This led to my very nice Professorship where I spend much of my time teaching, training young researchers, coordinating, motivating, assessing and advising, traveling, talking, writing, and — as this blog has been reporting — developing undergraduate curricula.

For most of my tasks I manage to muddle along quite effectively, but after a few scary nightmares in which Day 1 of our new curriculum arrives and we have missed something really fundamental (in one middle-of-the-night panic attack we had forgotten to recruit any students) I realized it was time for some professional help.

This is a good time for me to introduce the superb Studies team that we have in the Materials Department at ETH so as to give you an idea of the human resources that we have available for our curriculum revision: Andrea is the Studies Coordinator and takes care of everything to do with regulations, coordination with the Rector’s office, formal processes and so on. Sara is our Educational Developer in charge of the entire pedagogical side. Martin coordinates all our lab-based and practical courses and we are ably supported by Christina in administration. Not everyone is full time so we are about 2.7 humans in total and we are recruiting for an extra 0.5 to support us during the curriculum revision process.

After catching me gazing in horror at an Excel spreadsheet during a team meeting, Andrea and Sara had the excellent idea that we should hire a Management Coach. They were anyway keen on some formal management training for their own professional development, and a coach could provide us with that as well as shepherd us through our process in a consultant role. Brilliant! We contacted ETH Human Resources who directed us to Bachmann Coaching and Consulting because of their experience working in an academic environment. Christian Bachmann agreed to get started with a one-day workshop for the core project team.

So, Sara and Andrea, three of my faculty colleagues, one colleague from the ETH Teaching Development office and myself sat down for a crash course in project management. Christian did a superb job of cramming the theory and practical essentials that we will need to survive the process, with every example and exercise geared directly to the needs of our project. This one day investment of our time probably saved us weeks of ineffectiveness as well as many sleepless nights. By sometime around mid-morning, though, I started to wonder if I would make it to lunchtime let alone the end of the day as I reinforced my suspicion that management pedagogy is really not my thing. I mean really really not.

But now we understand our goals and objectives, our stakeholders and our various roles and tasks. We’ve developed a “Project Agreement” to clarify who does what and when and why, decided on our next steps, and even taken a few of them. I would strongly recommend this tactic for a project of this size if you don’t have project management experience.

It’s also good for ending nightmares.

My first tentative toe-dip into the Blogosphere turned out to be less scary than I imagined: No abusive messages or trolls, a little bit of enthusiasm via Twitter, email and the “Responses” section on the blog, and even an encouraging “Pingback” (thank you Hortense), which was certainly a new concept to me. Perhaps the most interesting response, however, came from my husband whose breakfast-time german-irregular-verbs memorization I interrupted by placing a printout of my blog pointedly next to his birchermuesli. “You can’t call What is Materials Science? an eternal question”, he said after a few minutes’ perusal, “It hasn’t been around long enough”.

Now for the sake of domestic harmony, I do have to admit he has something of a point. The first academic Materials Science departments started to emerge from Classical Metallurgy or Ceramics departments only around 60 years ago, prompted in part by US fears of Soviet supremacy in the Cold War. According to the Northwestern University Materials Science and Engineering Department’s web page, they were the first Department of Materials Science to be established (in 1958) in the world, with other institutions in the US and Europe following soon after. For a detailed history of the development of Materials Science and Engineering as a teaching discipline, I found this article by Clive Ferguson very informative.

But in terms of Materials Science as an activity, I would argue that I am on safe ground, since questions about the science of materials have occupied us, maybe not quite for eternity, but at least since the start of human consciousness. In fact, from the Stone Age, through the Bronze and Iron Ages, to today’s Silicon Age, every major advance in human civilization has been driven by a fundamental development in Materials Science, so much so that we even name our historical eras after the materials that dominated at the time. Without the early materials scientists who figured out processing techniques for natural materials such as stone, tools for grinding or cutting would not have been developed and there would have been no Neolithic Revolution. And whoever worked out the smelting process to extract metals from their ores (a truly remarkable development, since it needs a temperature above the melting point of the metal and a reducing atmosphere!) ushered in the Bronze Age with its establishment of cities and the beginnings of craft and trade. Through the Iron Age and ultimately culminating in the industrial revolution, metallurgists rightly held a highly respected place in society; my personal favourite is the responsibility borne by the “Anvil Priesthood” blacksmiths of Gretna Green, charged with marrying young couples who eloped to Scotland to escape the confines of the 1753 English Marriage Act.

Now we have moved on to the Silicon Age, with silicon-based transistors forming the core of the microelectronics that enable much of our modern way of life. And we have grown accustomed to tremendous ongoing improvements in silicon devices driving the “Moore’s Law” exponential increase in their capabilities that allows ever more automation and convenience in our everyday activities. We know, however, that we are starting to run into fundamental physical limits, set by the size of the individual silicon atoms, that will prevent ongoing miniaturization of silicon-based devices. We know that to continue the march of human progress, we will soon be forced to develop new device paradigms based on entirely new materials; to figure out the next step beyond the Silicon Age.

So the Materials Scientists that we are educating today will be charged with defining the next era of human civilization, and we are charged with training them in how to do that. That’s quite a challenging task! But at least these days we have another profession taking care of the wedding ceremonies…

(You can watch a video version of these thoughts combined with a mildly political diversity manifesto (and see me very very nervous) here.)

Whenever I ask one of my Physics Department colleagues what it means to be a Physicist, while she might not be able to give me a straightforward answer, she usually has a very clear picture in her head of who she is professionally and why. Likewise, Chemists and Biologists, or Mechanical and Civil Engineers, rarely have issues with their sense of identity. We Materials Scientists, on the other hand, repeatedly ask ourselves the question “What is Materials Science?”. Are we even a science at all, when many Materials Science Departments actually sit in Engineering Faculties? (At my former institution, UC Santa Barbara, we carefully called ourselves the “Materials Department” to side-step this issue).

To an outsider this existential angst might seem like so much professional naval gazing, especially when Time Magazine declared Materials Science the lowest stress profession.  But to an educator, charged with shaping the next generation of professional Materials Scientists it acquires a fundamental importance. What skills should a graduate of a leading Materials Science program take with them into the world. What do they need to be able to do and what should they know.

This blog documents our efforts in the Department of Materials Science at ETH Zürich to find the answer to this eternal question and to implement a new curriculum based on what we discover. Maybe we will never find the answer. But we’re convinced that our search for it will generate creative new ideas that will enhance student learning. And help our students develop into professional Materials Scientists with the best possible skill set for launching their careers in today’s rapidly evolving work environment. I hope that you will enjoy reading about our process and that both our mis-steps (hopefully not too large or too many) and successes (hopefully resounding and numerous) will help you in your own insititutions.

DISCLAIMER: The content of this blog is entirely my blatant one-sided view and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of ETH or any of my colleagues. Since I obviously can’t say that any resemblance to real people is accidental, instead I will try to be nice and hope that no-one sues me. All (preferably constructive) feedback gratefully and enthusiastically received.

So what did we do so far? Well, we agreed that while our curriculum is fabulous (of course) it is time for a shake-up before we start to feel out of date. We decided that we will plan ahead and try to identify the skill-set that our graduates will need in 2030, and that we will aim for Autumn 2020 as the start-date for our new program. I proposed “BS2020” for our project title but my colleagues vetoed it. Darn. But I have to agree that our final choice “The Materials Scientist in 2030, who is she?” is a bit more stylish. Oh, and we had a friend with design skills help us make this snazzy logo:

Our first concrete step has been a day-long retreat to walk through our current curriculum, in which we presented the learning goals of our classes to each other in the chronological order that we impose them on our students. We had two goals for the day: First to make sure that we all know what our students learn and when, and second to identify redundancies so as to make space for introducing new things. We succeeded with the first task, and I think we all found it very useful, even though it took a bit of a long time; our students really learn a lot of stuff! But it’s safe to say that we failed resoundingly with the second objective, in spite of what I thought was a rather cunning approach: Since I was sure no-one would willingly give up any of their own content, we made worksheets for each class so that the colleagues could suggest omissions from classes that were not their own. Kind of like those reality (?) TV shows in which the least popular people get voted off islands. I’m not sure if the colleagues didn’t get the concept or are just too nice, but we all loved everyone’s existing content and had helpful ideas for possible additions. But we didn’t find anything that wasn’t terribly important, nothing that we could let go. Hmmmm.

On the bright side, I guess we all ended the day feeling that our colleagues highly appreciate our teaching and maybe we now even like each other a bit more. Not a bad starting point from which to embark on the intensely collaborative project of a major curriculum revision.

So what next? Well, we learned that “making space” for changes in an existing curriculum is hard. So we decided to take the opposite approach — let’s imagine that we are starting completely from scratch and think about what we want to include.  Next time I will tell you about our series of small-group workshops on “The Materials Scientist, Who is She?” — what are the competencies we want our students to acquire? —  and “Curriculum Redesign” — what kinds of learning modules might be most effective for teaching which skills? Stay tuned…