Creating scalable reform in engineering education through low-cost intrinsic motivation course conversions of engineering courses

We present our efforts to create a scalable engineering education reform process that has a low barrier to adoption by focusing primarily on promoting students' intrinsic motivation (IM) to learn. Students who are intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated to learn are more likely to persist in their learning and perform better. Despite major investments in, and promising innovations for, reforming engineering education, many instructors are slow to adopt these innovations because of prohibitive time, money, and training investments. In contrast, the intrinsic motivation (IM) course conversion project has three goals: (1) to redesign the classroom based on motivational theories, (2) to improve students' learning by promoting their intrinsic motivation to learn, and (3) to implement the reform through methods that require minimal or zero additional costs to the faculty. We initially piloted one such IM course conversion in a sophomore-level computer engineering course (ECE 290) during the Fall 2011 term with 37 students. This pilot was scaled to encompass the full course in Fall 2012 with 220 students.