Mobile Studio Pedagogy, Part 1: Overcoming the Barriers that Impede Adoption

Abstract Overcoming the Barriers that Impede the Adoption of Mobile Studio Based Education and OutreachThe Mobile Studio I/O Board is a small, inexpensive hardware platform for use in a home,classroom or remote environment. When coupled with the Mobile Studio Desktop software, thesystem duplicates a large amount of the hardware often used to teach Electrical Engineering,Computer Engineering, Physics courses and K-12 technology courses. The project's goal is toenable hands-on exploration of STEM education principles, devices, and systems that havehistorically been restricted to expensive laboratory facilities. Similar hardware/softwareplatforms are now readily available from a variety of sources, most notably including NationalInstruments and Digilent. All make possible a new approach to education that has the potential tofundamentally change the kind of learning environment provided for students in STEM. Whileprevious papers have documented the many positive outcomes of use, many schools are reluctantto switch to this new method. A steady expansion of the number and kind of institutions adoptingMobile Studio pedagogy demonstrates that, while barriers do exist, they are being readilyovercome. The purpose of this paper is to address the barriers, both institutional andinstructional, that delay or hinder full implementation by examining the process of systemicchange at successful sites.The Mobile Studio learning platform originated at one school and then, with NSF CCLI support,began refinement and transfer to three schools, where it has been used to teach ECE courses forboth majors and non-majors. The schools include a research intensive university, an HBCU and aschool focused on undergraduate education. Essentially all electronics intensive courses at theseschools are now taught with Mobile Studio or a similar platform. With support from an NSFERC, the original 3 partners have expanded to 5 (adding another research university and anotherHBCU), plus several schools in Africa). Other schools also are now utilizing these tools,supported only by their own resources. For example: 1) another top research university haschanged their labs to be Mobile Studio based; 2) Mobile Studio is being used at a communitycollege, with several more 2 year schools about to begin their changeover; and 3) a major scale-up in Africa is about to commence.Documentation of relevance and usability is available; all of these programs utilize standardassessment tools as part of their accreditation procedures, and the core partners also useadditional pre and post surveys, interviews and observations to better understand how theapproach works as an educational experience for students. Some of the tools developed in thecore program are now also being applied at other schools for comparison purposes. Examinationof these institutions and their growing patterns of use have identified several common barriersrelated to organizational policies and infrastructure needs, and methods that can be used toovercome these barriers. More importantly, however, are the barriers and successful facilitatorsassociated with 1) faculty and staff expectations of institutional and learning approaches, and 2)faculty and student expectations of what student outcomes should be. This paper will summarizethese barriers and successful ways of coping with, decreasing, or eliminating them.