Systems engineering educational strategies: Incorporating active learning with a healthcare case study

Abstract

Over the last nearly 100 years, Systems Engineering principles, methods and tools evolved from several engineering related disciplines. The university's Department of Engineering Management, Systems, and Technology, teaches their Management of Engineering Systems course, modeled on the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK). This body of knowledge is wiki based, making it easy to navigate. The SEBok is designed to provide an overview of the material, with multiple references for accessing additional content and depth of material. However, the SEBoK is not designed for Masters students, who have little to no background in the SEBoK to easily learn or apply the material. The author has incorporated multiple educational strategies into a Systems Engineering course including: 1) informationproviding lectures, 2) inquiry-oriented case studies, 3) active or performance-based active learning exercises, 4) cooperative team-based system design, 5) creativity-inducing methods based application of systems engineering tools. Central to several of the strategies was to adapt a healthcare case study from the author's prior process and systems improvement work experience, to guide the students to better understand, synthesize and apply systems engineering. The case study supports the inquiry-oriented, active learning and case study pedagogies, helping students to learn by seeing examples of the application of the materials to real-world problems. In this paper, we will describe some of the tools and activities that were used to design a women's healthcare center for providing healthcare services in a one-stop, spa-like environment. The case study was used to help students learn and apply systems engineering tools and methods.