Content area
Full Text
Abstract
Interdisciplinary systems engineering (SE) courses are characterized by challenges associated with effective content presentation and delivery. Integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives regarding systems dynamics and systems thinking requires that students understand and apply a variety of connections and relationships between those perspectives. In doing so, the students develop a "systems mindset" that is defined by the ability to identify applications of systems dynamics outside of the boundaries of the classroom context and across a range of naturally occurring and human-engineered contexts. Non-hierarchical information structures made up of networks of relationships among concepts, previously described as "hypermedia," represent both an important toolset and a cognitive challenge to supporting effective SE education. Hypermedia interfaces emphasizing non-sequential, associative links to connect text and media content can demonstrate and support the exploration of these complex, conceptual relationships. However, purely unstructured navigation through interdisciplinary SE content can impose a cognitive load that hampers, rather than facilitates, connectivist learning (especially in novices). In this paper, the authors present a novel design for a hypermedia interface that supports associative links between SE content elements through the use of thematic tags. These tags allow the user to navigate through all instances of the topic presented in both paragraph-style lecture notes and captioned videos, enabling a more holistic exploration of thematic references throughout the course content. The authors describe the development and implementation of the tagging processes, which provide further insight into the interconnectedness of an interdisciplinary, systems-based approach to the design and delivery of SE education.
Keywords
Systems engineering education; hypermedia; non-sequential learning; information architecture
1.Introduction
Systems engineering (SE) is a broad, interdisciplinary field that emphasizes thorough and iterative problem and system definition and a "system as a whole" approach to consider factors beyond the boundaries of the system of interest. SE is critical to describing, predicting, designing, and influencing the complex systems that saturate modern life; these (physical or abstract) complex systems can be seen in each of both the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals [1] and the NAE's 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering [2]. Perhaps in recognition of the value of SE approaches in tackling "big problems," an increased demand for SE education can be observed over the last 13 years [3, 4]. However, SE education has four characteristics that...