Encouraging Students Actively Involved in Course Teaching Procedure

The current plans for most graduate courses in transportation programs follow the conventional teaching procedure, by which students have limited involvements in class meetings and hence lack enough interests in understanding new technologies covered. This motivates the idea of developing an active and workable syllabus for relevant transportation course(s) so as to encourage students to be involved in class teaching procedure. By the new style of teaching, the students use nearly half class time to present as "professors" and organize a class discussion on the assigned topics. Besides these, all students are required to finish a separate term project during the course of the entire semester, and prepare an eight page long formal report in the standard ASCE format. Feedbacks from students illustrate that they like this new style of learning process, and feel more interests in learning new technologies and more confident in public communications.