Implementation of active learning in digital systems course

Abstract

Digital Systems is one of the more difficult courses in the undergraduate Electrical Engineering curriculum. Students are expected to master all levels of Bloom's taxonomy since an outcome of the course is the ability to design digital hardware that executes some algorithms. In this paper, we describe our effort to improve the teaching and learning process for this subject by using active learning approaches. The use of software and hardware was fully emphasized in this course through a continuous series of milestones. Padlet and E-learning were used to make student's learning of concepts visible during class time. Besides, project-based learning is implemented as an out of class learning activity for the course. Based on students' reflections of the course, the approach had effectively developed the students' understanding of digital system concepts and designs. A comparison between the performance of the course learning outcomes attainment is done between cohorts 20132014 (semester 2014/2015-2) and 20172018 (semester 2018/2019-2). The result shows that the cohort that went through active learning achieved higher performance compared to the traditional teaching method.