Re-Engineering Engineering Education

Interesting article. Olin sounds like a school built on project or problem-based education. That approach helps you stay motivated and connected to real-world applications. (A major reason why problem-based approaches were adopted by med schools, even for first-year education.) The difficulty is how to educate students on the base of knowledge that must be mastered if they are only learning the bits relevant to a given problem. Or maybe the approach assumes that mastering core knowledge of any domain is difficult if not futile, due to changing and increasing knowledge, so best to teach them to learn what they need to know.

I've occasionally seen some project-based courses at traditional universities that fit the Olin theme. This new Facebook course would be one example: http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/9/25/facebookMovesInt...

A more advanced example was a course offered at Stanford Bioengineering last year. About 15 students (mostly graduate) were taught how to model blood flow using 3D medical images, and half of the semester was spent on class projects where five teams built and simulated their own models of clinically-relevant conditions. They did an amazing job, and I would think they learned quite a bit. (You can see their presentations here: https://simtk.org/home/bioe484)

It's funny that Stanford, like Olin, was established as a tuition-free educational experiment. Wonder how long tuition remains free at Olin :)

As an Engineering major, I really wish I could go to this school. However, as a startup founder, I really wish I wasn't bogged down with school (Not that I'm saying school is bad, it just takes up much more of my time than I'd like it to).

About time. I brought this up a ways back: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37850

It took centuries and a lot of very smart people to develop calculus and now students are expected to learn all that while building a golf ball machine.