#BigBeacon Twitter Chat – May 20 – What do students want from education, and what do they need?

Join Students for a Whole New Education on Wednesday, May 20 at 8pm ET for our chat about:

The Mismatch between what Students Want and what they Need

When students are about their education, it’s usually to get feedback about the quality of courses and teaching. Students often times are not asked about what they want from their education. From our experiences, many students tend to “go with the flow” and accept their education as it is. Students don’t always feel that we have agency in our education. The structure of engineering education today, and higher education at large, tends to focus on what we feel students need from their education. This is often times done without input from students.

But what if we asked students what they wanted from their education? What if we encouraged students to take ownership of their education? This Twitter chat is a way for students to express how they feel about their education and share what they want from education. We hope to foster a discussion between students and other education stakeholders about what the priorities should be in engineering education.

Some questions to think about before the chat:

• What do engineering students need to learn during their education? What should the priorities be?
• What do engineering students want to learn during their education? What do students’ believe are the priorities?
• Is there a compromise we can make to balance these, if these priorities conflict?
• Does the culture of higher education value student voices?

Big Beacon invites students to join in our Twitter Chats focused student-centered issues! We want to engage students in our conversations to transform engineering education. We want to bring student voices to a platform that listens to students’ ideas and experiences and cherishes them. Big Beacon values student voices as professional voices and are as valued as those of teachers, professors, and administrators.

About Students for a Whole New Education

Students for a Whole New Education (SWNE) is an initiative Big Beacon launched this year to empower students to become change agents in engineering education. We want to keep students central to change efforts and encourage students to be active in conversations about transforming education. SWNE aims to bring together students from around the world who are united by the challenges they face in an education system that resists change.

How to Twitter Chat

If you’ve never Twitter chatted before, don’t worry; it’s very easy! First, get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one, and log in. At 8 PM ET on Wednesday go to twitter.com and type #BigBeacon into the search box on Twitter. Thereafter all the tweets with the hashtag #BigBeacon will show up on your Twitter page. To participate, simply express your opinion by sending a tweet, and be sure to append the hashtag #BigBeacon so other members of the Twitter Chat see you are posting. Alternatively, automate the hashtag search and append feature by using the free service Tchat at http://www.tchat.io.