Implementation of Topic Study Activities in Engineering Education

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that, there is a need to propose new approaches and educational methods in order to address current problems of engineering education programs. This study summarized the implementation of a real life term project and Topic Study concepts in an engineering education course. The curriculum of this course is organized to provide skills on making presentation, research and applying knowledge to solve real-life problems, preparing reports and making discussions on a specific topic. This study describes as a case study how these problems are addressed in an engineering education course namely Data Warehousing and Data Mining. It is aimed to improve students’ motivation and interest to the course as well as to improve their active participation in the course. By this approach it is aimed to help them to construct their own knowledge. This paper also presents the structure of the course and evaluation of grades with the results of a survey on students’ opinion about the real-life term project and Topic Study approaches in this course.