Reengineering Biomedical Engineering Curricula: A New Product Development Approach

Product development engineers in medical industries have created design control procedures to ensure high quality designs that are as error-free as possible. The reason is simple; companies must adhere to certain engineering and manufacturing best practices in order to obtain certification of their devices for sale in the US and abroad. We describe here an ongoing effort to apply these industrial best practices to the design and implementation of a novel sequence of undergraduate biomedical computing courses within the Department of Bio-medical Engineering at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). We have tightly integrated our industrial advisory board into this design and development effort. The board has contributed to significantly to the orderly generation of curricular requirements, the development of course implementation designs and the evaluation of these designs per requirements

Embedded Librarians and the TEACH Act

Embedded librarians who work in online courses in American post-secondary institutions should embrace the Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization Act, or TEACH Act, the federal law that governs online teaching and learning. As embedded librarians take on online instructional assignments, knowledge of TEACH will provide guidance in their role as online instructors. In addition, as they come to a better understanding of TEACH and copyright issues the law covers, based in part on their knowledge of copyright concerns in library-related situations, embedded librarians will have more clarity about the work they can and cannot do in an online environment. Finally, as embedded librarians increase their presence in online classes in varied ways, the embedded librarian position evolves into a version of Bell and Shank\u27s blended librarian who serves as both a librarian and educator, and becomes a more valuable member of the academic community. The current lack of discussion about the provisions of the TEACH Act among embedded librarians who write about the work they have done in online courses, however, is a troubling sign. Knowledge of the TEACH Act will help protect embedded librarians and others from copyright infringement and aid in the further development of embedded librarianship