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Session 3255

Designing and Implementing Graduate Programs in Engineering Education

O. Hayden Griffin, Jr.1, Alex Aning1, Vinod K. Lohani1, Jean Kampe1, Richard Goff1, Marie Paretti1, Michael Alley1, Jenny Lo1, Janis Terpenny1, Thomas Walker1, Hassan Aref 2, Susan Magliaro3, and Mark Sanders4 1 Department of Engineering Education/ 2 Dean, College of Engineering/ 3 Director, School of Education/ 4 Professor and Program Leader, Technology Education Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Introduction

Recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the lack of training of the majority of engineering faculty in topics involving human learning, appropriate pedagogical approaches for engineering topics, and design, implementation, and evaluation of curricula. The National Science Foundation addressed the issue by the creation of the engineering education consortia, and as a result significant changes took place on the landscape of engineering education in the United States. However, the changes seemed to be localized in some universities. In the years since the cessation of funding for the coalitions, there seems to have been a renewed interest in both applying what was learned from the coalitions and also to bringing to bear more recent knowledge developed by “education” researchers, knowledge that was developed sometimes in an engineering context and sometimes not.

Engineering as a profession in the United States is facing a number of challenges at the present time. Declining interest in engineering careers obviously poses a major challenge for engineering colleges charged to produce qualified engineers. A recent report from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)1 indicates that the federal science and engineering workforce is shrinking and a significant number of scientists and engineers will soon retire. Further, a 2001 report from the U.S. Department of Labor2 indicates that women and minorities make up 60% of the total workforce, but they are dramatically underrepresented in science and engineering careers. As engineering educators, it is a great challenge for us to make engineering careers attractive to a diverse section of society. We must devise innovative ways to attract a broad range of students to pursue engineering careers. With the explosive growth in data/information transmission, a part of the challenge is for instructors to adapt to the learning styles of the individual students, not focus on the teacher’s preferred style. In fact, since every class is somewhat diverse in personality and learning styles, every engineering instructor should be using multiple teaching techniques known to be effective for different learning styles for all of the material in order to reach the entire class with most of the material. While almost everyone would agree with the last statement, very few engineering instructors truly understand how people learn, so they are not capable of designing courses to match learning styles. Effective use of technology to reduce the cost and broaden the reach of engineering education is yet another important issue for which general approaches are well-known in the education community, and not so well known in the engineering education community.

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Walker, T., & Magliaro, S., & Alley, M., & Aref, H., & Aning, A., & Griffin, H., & Sanders, M., & Paretti, M., & Goff, R., & Terpenny, J., & Lohani, V., & Lo, J., & Kampe, J. (2005, June), Designing And Implementing Graduate Programs In Engineering Education Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14438