Four Years Worth of First Year Curriculum Changes

One of the things I always emphasize to potential Olin students is that the curriculum is in flux. One of Olin's goals is essentially to be a testing place for new ideas and practices in engineering education. Participating in that experiment is part of being an Olin student.

With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to list ways in which Olin's curriculum has changed while I've been here. It turns out that the changes to the first year curriculum alone are quite extensive, so in this post I'll start with those.

Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?

Reflections on Second Semester, Part 2

This is the second of a few posts looking back at the semester that just ended. The posts are split up by class or activity. This post focuses on my other two classes, Principles of Modern Biology and Real World Measurements (RWM).

Traditional

My second semester at Olin started two weeks ago. I have a pretty traditional schedule this semester, which is a little odd after the fall. I'm taking Real World Measurements, Modern Biology, Partial Differential Equations, and Physics of Waves. Despite how traditional most of my classes seem from the titles, they're still very Olin-ish, just in different ways than my classes last semester were. The classes have each met several times now, so I'm going to go through each one below the fold.