Fund Project PHOTON PBL

Project Overview

PHOTON Problem-Based Learning
A Photonics Professional Development Project

Photonics, described as the practical application of light and optical components, is one of the most pervasive new technologies of the twenty-first century.

Examples of photonics technology include:
•    Lasers
•    Optics
•    Fiber optics
•    LASIK
•    Holograms
•    Flat-panel LCD displays
•    Satellite imagery

In the same way that electronics changed our lives in the twentieth century, photonics is now playing and will continue to play a critical role in enabling manufacturing, medical, environmental, telecommunications, homeland security, and defense technologies in this century.

The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) has received a three-year grant from the Advanced Technological Education program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to fund Project PHOTON PBL. The grant is the fourth in a series of NSF grants awarded to NEBHE to strengthen optics/photonics curricula in secondary schools and community colleges in New England and across the country. The new grant employs Problem-Based Learning (PBL) where technology students will solve real-world “challenges” contributed by industry and research partners.

While PBL has been used extensively in medical education since the early 1970s and has been widely adopted in other fields including business, law and education, it is only beginning to emerge as an alternative to the traditional lecture-based approach in engineering and technology education.

The goals of PHOTON PBL are to:

Create eight multimedia problem-based challenges and instructional resources in photonics technology to complement the highly successful PHOTON curriculum and laboratory materials. The materials will be aligned to academic and industry skill standards.

Recruit and train high school and community college photonics technology instructors from 16 institutions to implement, assess and evaluate the problem-based challenges in classrooms with their students.

Conduct quantitative and qualitative research on the efficacy of PBL in engineering technician education.

Outreach and disseminate the field tested problem-based challenges and research findings to high schools, community colleges and four-year colleges and universities that offer technology programs.

Project Principal Investigator is Fenna Hanes (NEBHE). Co-principal Investigators are Professor Judy Donnelly (Three Rivers Community College), Dean Nicholas Massa (CCSU), Marijke Kehrhahn (University of Connecticut) and Professor Richard Audet (Roger Williams University).