A Week in Olin: Not a College but a Lab in Engineering Education

Ever since I met Richard Miller, President of Olin College, in 2010 at IIT Gandhinagar, I had been dreaming of visiting Olin, a small private engineering college near Boston. Each batch of students is less than 100, and unlike its well known counterparts, it offers only under-graduate program. The total student body on campus is about 350. Fully residential. The first batch of students was admitted only in 2002. So it is a rather new college.The degrees it offers are in "Electrical and Computer Engineering," "Mechanical Engineering," and simple, "Engineering." Under "Engineering" program, students can design their own specialization and get it approved by the college.

Olin is not an ordinary college. It is really a research lab to test ideas on how to teach engineering, and the students love to be guinea pigs there. It is one of the most difficult college to get into in US.

Every year, they conduct a one-week Summer Institute, in which any university in the world can send a team of 3 faculty members or more, and they explain through a variety of workshops and personalized sessions their pedagogy and indeed, their story. This year, it was from 4th to 8th June, and I was lucky that J K Lakshmipat University, Jaipur, where I am working as an academic advisor, invited me to join two other faculty members of the university to attend this event. A dream come true for me. This year, there were 18 universities from 11 countries in 5 continents. (And a very positive side effect was the friendships we made across the globe and across the border.) They conduct this summer institute because it is one of their missions to promote quality engineering education pedagogy.

The keywords that you would hear at Olin all the time include "Project Based Learning," Design, "Student Centric," Inter-disciplinary, and so on. And these happy to be keywords that you would hear these days on any campus, in any presentation, but at Olin, they are not just keywords to be spoken, but values to be lived.

Typically, "Project Based Learning" means that we will assign a project to a student group in the beginning of the semester. This is in addition to the 40-lectures, exams, quizzes, and so on. We will tell the students to come back to us if they ever had any difficulty. And at the end of the semester, we announce a date when we will look at their presentation and demo. No student comes to see you throughout the semester, since obviously they are so smart that they can't possibly have any difficulty. But one week before the demo, you start receiving requests for extension of deadline. You agree to a one week extension. On the day of the demo, you can see that everyone is having red eyes. They have done all the work in the last 48 hours.

Olin is different. A project means that the students meet faculty at least twice a week, for 100 minutes each time. In a typical session, there may be 5-6 groups with two faculty members. Larger number of groups would mean additional manpower support in terms of under-graduate TAs called NINJAs in the local lingo ("Need Information Now; Just Ask"). In our institutes, we will keep worrying about under-graduate TAs helping unfairly their friends with better grades, hence avoid using an excellent and cheap resource that most of us have. With this kind of interaction, the faculty knows exactly what each group member is doing, where they need support, etc. There are several intermediate goals in terms of defining scope of the project, mid-term reports and reviews, etc. So the students make progress throughout the semester. Also, the projects are not assigned from the top. Students decide their projects, and hence they are really excited about doing them. And invariably, they have to be useful in real life. And in many courses, there are no scheduled lectures. You learn even complex material while working on the project, largely on your own. The faculty can guide you, tell the right material to read, may even explain an occasional concept, but largely you learn yourself. Of course, not all courses are like this. Every course has something unique, and there are some courses which are the regular 40-lecture courses.

The very first workshop was to tell us what students do on day 1 of their first semester. They have a course called "Design Nature." On day 1, they go to a nearby forest. They are told to observe nature and do a project that replicates nature. You could replicate flying, or swimming, or hopping or whatever. We were put in groups of 4, given a few cardboard pieces, rubber bands, springs, tape, scissor, etc., and asked to make something that hops. It wasn't simple. Initially, we were to do things individual, then in groups of 2, and finally in groups of 4, every time discussing with others, sharing our design and improving the design. This was a lesson not just in design but teamwork as well. They later showed us the "hopping devices" that students make in about 5 weeks. Very impressive for someone who has just joined college.

Another very interesting workshop was about how they teach a course on History and Material Science. Yes, a combination of history and Material science. Two professors jointly teach this course. Once again, we were put into the same situation as the students on first day of this course, put into groups of 4. There were many consumer goods on a table on the side. Each group was to pick up one thing. Our group picked up the bottled water. Now, we were told to think of questions that we could ask about this product from a material science point of view. Well, we started thinking why is water packaged in plastic, are there different types of plastics, could there be other materials, how do we test if a material would be good enough for this purpose. Is plastic polluting water by any chance. Is the water quality in the bottle substantially better than the quality in the tap water that we are willing to pay so much for it, and so on. They told us that each group would come up with their own questions, and would actually learn about different materials, their properties, and indeed use a wonderful material science lab to test those properties. In parallel, we were to think of questions that would be interested in from the perspective of history. We thought hard, and felt that we first need to think of the purpose that the bottled water serve today. Then we should think of whether that is a purpose unique to modern society or was it needed in historical times. If yes, how did they solve their problem. We felt that bottle was really a water transportation mechanism. Then we wanted to study how did historical societies transported water in large (river to a nearby city) and small (a person, or a family traveling) quantities. We were then told that the old Roman empire had built aqua ducts, and this would lead to studying of the Roman civilization, etc. And the small quantity was transported initially by earthen pots and vessels made of animal skin, and later, after bronze age, vessels made of copper and bronze. So when did bronze age start, what was its impact and all that. So if we had continue in this course for the entire semester, we would study all that, mostly on our own.

Not only it was very interesting, but also, every group in the class was studying different things. They said that they would make sure that every one learnt a very small core of material science. But beyond that, they would learn different things. I can't imagine in our universities (or any other ones), the curriculum to be so flexible. But come to think of it, if one student learns Indus Valley civilization and the other one studies Roman or Greek civilization, what is wrong. Learning of history teaches us critical thinking, and that would happen to both groups. And what both groups have also learnt is to learn oneself. Those are important skills. And, of course, communication, and team work.

Another interesting class was the "User Centric Design." Again, groups of 3-4 students. They will brainstorm in the beginning of the semester as to what is the target audience for whom they are designing some dummy product. Then they will actually go and meet many such persons. Find a problem to be solved. Design a product that solves it. Discuss that design with the target group. They told us that students are keen to actually build the product right from the beginning of the semester, and they have to be told that there would be many other courses and projects to build things and that design is an equally important challenging component of finally coming out of the product.

We hear many times statements such as "we want every student to succeed," and we feel that these are some of those motherhood statements that we should keep speaking without meaning them. But at Olin, they really care for their students. Continuous feedback throughout the semester, evaluation of motivation levels, and if one sees the motivation levels going down, then researching into reasons for it, and fixing the way the course is taught (or not fixing, if it is felt that handling stress is a learning outcome in the course).

I found the final year project to be very exciting. They have decided that it has to be something that makes a real impact and not the toy projects that we often do in IITs. There are two kinds of projects. One, working on a problem in collaboration with a company. Typically a large team of 5-6 students and 1-2 faculty members, and they take up really challenging problems. They had a lot of posters about the kind of problems they have taken up in the past few years in their corridor and it made a very impressive list. The other possibility is to join an ongoing multi-year project under the category, "Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship" (ADE). Projects under ADE are typically to design solution to a problem faced by disenfranchised class whether in US or abroad. The team formation for industry supported projects is very interesting. Depending on the skills required to do a project, the faculty will decide the team. However, each student can give a list of two students with whom they don't want to be in the team. So teams are formed keeping the small negative lists in mind. They seem to have done a lot of research into team formation - when to form teams randomly, when to ask students to form teams, and so on. (Like they have done research on every aspect of teaching/learning process.)

Is this project based learning causing them to not understand the basics very well. Their own answer is that several students are going for PhDs in top research universities and are able to do very well in the research programs which require an understanding of basics. Also, I met a student who had spent her 6th semester in MIT. I asked her if she had any difficulty in doing courses at MIT which has huge focus on basics. She said that she had no difficulty and performed well in MIT. The industry seems to love their graduates.

I had a detailed discussion with a faculty member of Maths regarding a course on linear algebra, which is considered absolutely crucial for engineering in most places. And he argued that it is not necessary to do a 40-lecture course when all you need to learn is which library routine to call for what kind of problem. If we give up on understanding of basics, we can use that time to learn higher order skills or different skills which are more relevant for an engineer, we would be making a better engineer out of our students. And depend more on just-in-time learning for whatever has not been taught. So your program needs to ensure that students can learn on their own whenever they need that knowledge.

And Olin is not just about experimenting in the classroom. They have experimented with other things too. For example, none of their faculty members is permanent (tenured in US parlance). When they started, it was said that they won't be able to attract and retain quality faculty, since they would prefer to go to other universities who provide permanent jobs. Olin has been able to attract and retain absolutely outstanding faculty.

And finally, I think Olin is where it is because of the leadership of Prof. Miller. The founding President (Vice Chancellor or Director in our case) is so important to set up the right processes and culture.