Encouraging Active Learning for System Engineering Students Using Role-Exchanging Activities

The paper intends to explain the trend of modern technologies and the challenges of system engineering education. In addition to leveraging learning-by-doing and experimental learning approaches, in the paper, we refer to the student-centered learning approach and design a role-exchanging (RE) session to encourage students to ask and to answer questions. The main objective of a RE session is to open students’ brain, so that the teacher may know what students have learned from the discussion and the interaction among students. Two types of RE sessions are implemented in this research: with a time constraint and without a time constraint. Taking the “Embedded Operating Systems (EOS)” as an experimental course, we demonstrate how we implemented the two types of RE sessions. From our experience of implementation, a RE session without time constraint allows students to have a more in-depth discussion for the specified topic. However, the session may be less efficient if no proper reward policy is designed with the session. For a RE session with a time constraint, students need to prepare more questions in advance, and the teacher should involve less in the session, in which the teacher cannot explain too much if ambiguous answers were given in the Q&A in the RE session. We show our implementation of RE sessions in the paper and share the results to the teachers’ community where the applicant participates so that the RE sessions can be applied to future innovative courses in system engineering education.