Work in Progress: Rethinking How We Teach in Engineering Through a Course Redesign Initiative (original) (raw)

The future of engineering education. VI. Making reform happen

Chemical Engineering Education, 2000

We have dealt in this series with changing conditions in technology and society that will require major reforms in engineering education, 1 instructional techniques that have been shown by theoretical and empirical research to produce learning outcomes consistent with these reforms, 2,3 ways to prepare faculty members to implement the techniques, 4 and effective techniques for assessing both teaching and educational scholarship. 5 Those were the easy matters. The real challenge is to create a favorable climate for these changes at research universities-a climate that motivates faculty members to improve their teaching and the quality of instruction in their departments, supports their efforts to do so, and rewards their successes. In this paper we suggest steps that might be taken to create such a climate.

The scholarship of teaching and learning in engineering

… Scholarship of Teaching …, 2002

Engineering professors, like professors in every field, have always experimented with innovative instructional methods, but traditionally little was done to link the innovations to learning theories or to evaluate them beyond anecdotal reports of student satisfaction. More scholarly approaches have become common in the past two decades as a consequence of several developments, including a change in the engineering program accreditation system to one requiring learning outcomes assessment and continual improvement, and the literature of the scholarship of teaching and learning in engineering has grown rapidly. Most published studies have used surveys and quantitative research methods, approaches with which engineers tend to be relatively comfortable, but studies that use some of the qualitative methods characteristic of social science research have also begun to appear. The challenge to engineering education is to make the scholarship of teaching and learning equal to the scholarships of discovery, integration, and application in the faculty reward system.

The future of engineering education

32nd Annual Frontiers in Education, 2002

The first four papers in this series 1-4 offered a number of ideas for effective teaching and preparing faculty members to teach. An inevitable question is, how does one determine whether or not a faculty member's teaching is effective? Another important question is, how does one determine whether or not an instructional program-such as that of an engineering department-is effective? The instructional component of the mission of every educational institution is to produce graduates with satisfactory levels of knowledge, skills, and attitudes. 1 The specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes may differ from one department to another and the definition of satisfactory may differ from one institution to another, but the instructional mission is invariant. In engineering, the basis of a department's accreditation is the extent to which the department is fulfilling this mission. An instructor may be a brilliant lecturer with student ratings at the top of the charts, but if his or her teaching is not furthering the instructional mission of the department, that teaching cannot be considered effective. To appraise programmatic teaching effectiveness, we must answer the following questions: 5,6 1. Educational goals. What are the published goals of the instructional program? Does the faculty know what they are? Does the faculty generally agree with them? CRITERIA FOR EFFECTIVE COURSE INSTRUCTION Evaluation of either programmatic teaching effectiveness or individual faculty member performance involves assessing the quality of instruction in individual courses. Extensive research supports the use of the following criteria as a basis for the assessment: 8-15 1. The course contributes toward published program goals. 2. The course has clearly stated measurable learning objectives. 2 3. The assignments and tests are tied to the learning objectives and are fair, valid, and reliable. 2 4. Appropriate methods have been devised to monitor the effectiveness of the instruction. 5. The learning environment is appropriate. 2,3 6. The instructor has appropriate expertise in the course subject. 7. The instructor communicates high expectations of students and a belief that they can meet those expectations, interacts extensively with them inside and outside class, conveys a strong desire for them to learn and motivates them to do so. 8. The instructor seeks to provide an education in the broadest sense of the word, not just knowledge of technical content. (See Reference 1.) 9. The instructor integrates teaching with research. 10. The instructor continually attempts to improve the course by updating the content and/or making use of new instructional materials and methods (including applications of instructional technology). 11. The students achieve the learning objectives. More details are given by Woods.

Project Catalyst: Successes and Frustrations of Introducing Systemic Change to Engineering Education

2001

Project Catalyst is a NSF funded initiative to promote systemic change in engineering education by having faculty collaborate in teams to re-envision their roles in the students' learning process. The ultimate goals of the project are: • to educate engineering faculty in instructional design techniques that are then implemented throughout the curriculum, • to transform the classroom into an active learning environment using cooperative learning and other learning approaches, and • to efficiently and effectively incorporate the use of information technology in the learning process. Initial efforts at Bucknell University have focussed on getting both students and faculty to work together as teams. For the first time, faculty members from across the engineering disciplines are making coordinated and sustained efforts to change the way they teach. This paper discusses the results of those initial efforts, including successes and failures of the initial implementation. The changes discussed were implemented in courses across the engineering curriculum, both in terms of class year and major. Conclusions and lessons are drawn from all of these courses, and three in particular are highlighted, to demonstrate "real" application of cooperative and collaborative learning ideas. Colleagues at other institutions who are frustrated by the current state of their students' learning, and who might consider implementing similar changes at their institutions will be interested in our experiences. The process of bringing faculty together as a team has, itself, been enlightening. We have found that there is a considerable transition to be made getting even collegial faculty members with similar

Faculty wide curriculum reform: the integrated engineering programme

European Journal of Engineering Education

Many traditional engineering schools are struggling to balance the calls to provide an innovative engineering education that meet the demands of graduates and their employers with the constraints and momentum of their existing curriculum. In this paper we present the conceptual design behind a framework that integrates existing discipline-specific content with threads of professional skills and design through a backbone of problem-based learning experiences. This framework creates a studentcentred pedagogy that has been implemented across eight departments of a large engineering school in a research-intensive university.

A Master's Program that Introduces Teachers to Engineering Practice

2000

¾ Michigan Technological university has developed a new Master of Science in Applied Science Education for inservice teachers. As part of this program, teachers are required to complete a 12 -credit applied science core focusing on real-life engineering app lications of math and science. This 12 -credit core consists of three courses offered as summer intensives -The Engineering Process, Engineering Applications in the Physical Sciences, and Engineering Applications in the Earth Sciences. Through these courses students have been exposed to many different engineering disciplines as Michigan Tech faculty explained the societal, economic, and technological significance of key areas in their fields of expertise. This paper describes our Masters' program and provides assessment data from the engineering core courses.