Two WPI professors reveal the future role of AI in engineering education at exclusive workshop
Dean of Engineering John McNeill and Assistant Professor Koksal Mus, both from WPI’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, recently hosted a session at an invitation-only workshop for engineering educators at Sabanci University, Turkey. Only nine universities worldwide were invited, including MIT and UC Berkeley, two of the top five engineering and technology schools in the 2024 QS World University Rankings.
The goal of the workshop was for a small number of higher-education leaders to put their heads together and ideate strategies for the future of engineering education. McNeill and Mus’s session, “Artificial Intelligence in Project-Based Learning at WPI,” aimed to show their fellow educators how AI can drive a learner-centered experience for the next generation of STEM students.
Current State: Evolution and Benefits of Project-Based Learning
Dean of Engineering John McNeill gives his portion of the presentation on project-based learning at WPI.
Their session began with an overview of how project-based learning (PBL) at WPI has evolved and how it benefits students. McNeill explained that PBL has experienced three waves of evolution at WPI since its introduction in the 1970s:
- In the first wave, projects were designed to help students learn discipline-specific skills.
- Later, the second wave expanded to include professional skills.
- Currently, the third wave also helps students build self-efficacy—the belief in their own ability to overcome challenges.
How does PBL build self-efficacy? During projects, student teams solve open-ended, unfamiliar problems under the mentorship of a faculty member. As a result, students develop confidence and competence to struggle, learn, apply, and succeed while functioning as effective teammates and project managers.
“WPI's pioneering approach to PBL has had a positive, measurable impact on the professional and personal success of our alumni,” said McNeill, citing qualitative and quantitative survey results from over 2,000 alumni respondents. (View data on the lifelong impact of PBL.)
When graduates have professional skills and believe that they know what to do in any situation, they’re more ready for the rapidly evolving future of work. And now that the world of STEM and higher education are experiencing large-scale disruption due to AI, PBL will become even more critical.
In fact, McNeill showed, AI’s role in driving student-centered learning will come to define the next wave of PBL’s evolution.
AI learning technologies are the next step in the natural progression of project-based education.
Future State: AI-Enhanced Project-Based Learning
Here, Mus took the lead to demonstrate how AI technologies can be used to students’ benefit, further enhancing the impact of PBL. If leveraged properly, Mus said, AI can accelerate student-centered learning, particularly in a project-based environment where learning is active, collaborative, and self-directed.
AI can help move students further in Bloom's Taxonomy, which is a hierarchical framework used to categorize educational goals.
In this next wave of PBL, the emphasis will be on creativity, critical thinking, and innovation. Because Gen Z and Gen Alpha students are digital natives accustomed to using technology, integrating AI tools into education will be essential to hold their attention. These tools will not only help them master course material on their own time, but also play a vital role in enhancing their engagement, fostering creativity, and developing innovation skills as the classroom turns into a place for open discourse and collaborative problem solving. Instructors will use their experience and expertise to guide classroom discussions and provide mentorship on research and projects.
With the incorporation of certain AI learning tools, PBL will have the power to improve self-efficacy and DEI outcomes to an even greater degree than before. For example, virtual teaching assistants (VTAs) enhanced by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can be trained to support students of different backgrounds, use session logs to update course material and learning outputs, and analyze individual needs.
AI technologies will meet the demands of Gen Z and Gen Alpha learners.
Though McNeill and Mus’s session was meant to last 30 minutes, it lasted more than an hour because the highly engaged participants asked so many questions. Participants were most surprised—and relieved—to learn that an AI-powered, personalized learning approach, where students direct their own learning, would not diminish the role of instructor but elevate it.