Certificates in Advanced Manufacturing (CAM)
Certificates in Advanced Manufacturing (CAM)
Building Capacity for Skilled Thinking Using Problem-Based Case Learning
An increasingly complex world of materials and processes is straining our nation's capacity to educate technicians to be continual learners, extending their current knowledge and skills to meet the demands of rapidly changing manufacturing environments. The Certificates in Advanced Manufacturing (CAM) Project is funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education Program (Award # 0603178). CAM applies advances in teaching and learning theory to technician education in composites technology in the areas of aerospace, marine and transportation, consumer products, and medical devices.
Traditional curriculum and training methods tend to emphasize content and often do not emphasize development of critical thinking and self awareness, which are central to the kind of observation and problem solving identified by employers as 21st Century Skills (see the enGauge 21st Century Skills report).
The goal of CAM is to purposely integrate education that promotes the critical thinking, self awareness, and layers of learning to accelerate moving from novice to expert (How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, 2000, Bransford, J., Brown, A. and Cocking, R., et al) in the content area of composites. This acceleration of learning has become more crucial as the complexity of materials and processes increase and even slight variation in detailed procedures can render a product defective. The evolving structure of the global marketplace also cannot be ignored as a motivator to expand the knowledge and skills of our workforce so that our manufacturing industries can stay competitive.
To this end, overall design features in CAM include Problem Based Case Learning (PBCL), how people learn, and how to take a foundation of previous experience and knowledge and build on it through a variety of interactive methods. Structurally, this includes repetition of material by adding depth through each learning cycle, both in the content areas of composite technology and the honing of critical thinking, problem solving and meta-cognitive skills. The CAM approach is to integrate Problem-Based Case Learning at the beginning of instruction and reinforce it throughout the CAM classes. This instructional design builds the capacity for skillful thinking and yields richer and deeper learning, assisting students to make more complete use of learning environments.
There are four specialized composites certificates in the CAM series: aerospace, marine and transportation, consumer products, and medical devices. Each certificate consists of four courses, with as much as two thirds of the course core content shared by all four of the certificates. The first unit of the first course in each certificate is a broad introduction to composite manufacturing and the PBCL process, integrating "the direct teaching of skillful thinking" with basic composites content, teaching students to examine their learning process.
Building in "learning to learn" and problem-solving skill development (meta-cognition) at the very beginning of the course using the PBCL model and structuring a portion of each class time to reflect on connecting new learning to an existing foundation of knowledge and experience are CAM design innovations. Also, structuring a looping repetition of the content of both the composites topics and PBCL concepts and tools, adding layers of depth within the context of the big ideas involved, is integral to the design of the CAM curriculum.
Curriculum designers on the CAM team have extensive industry experience as well expertise in PBCL and have interviewed a variety of industry participants, educators, and ATE Centers at events such as the HI-TEC Conference held in Scottsdale, Arizona, in July 2009.
