A Multi-Decade Response to the Call for Change

Engineering and society have always been intertwined, especially with the accepted realization of technology\u27s significant and rapidly increasing influence on the evolution of society. As a profession, engineering has a vital role in sustainably meeting needs and exploring opportunities that are ever changing and evolving. As societal and industry needs have evolved, engineering education itself has raised the call several times for evolving the way engineers are educated; however, the recent history of engineering education is, overall, one of missed opportunities. This was brought to a headline recently as ASEE leadership authored an article entitled “Stuck in 1955, Engineering Education Needs a Revolution.” Those words say it all. We see a need for a revolution in engineering education that looks at developing a whole new engineer that is equipped to operate in the age of information and Industry 4.0. This is vital to not only the field of engineering but for society. This paper parallels the calls for change in engineering education with the development story of a multi-disciplinary engineering education model that is often referred to as a beacon of light for change in engineering education. As is highlighted in the currently ongoing ASEE workforce summit series, the world of engineering is shifting beneath our feet. The world of engineering education must shift with it or face irrelevancy. The future iterations of this program are focused on developing graduates with digital savvy, new skills in innovating and collaborating, problem framing expertise, and horizontal leadership skills, while putting emphasis on the impacts in the economic development of rural regions. In the initial stages, 1990’s–2000’s, the program’s faculty spent time innovating in courses and curricula trying to shift towards the recently released ABET 2000 student outcome criteria in a rural community college setting. The mid-2000’s brought the development of a multi-disciplinary upper division university satellite program that embraced the Aalborg (DK) model of PBL. The new multi-disciplinary program had ABET outcomes at its core, focusing on the development of a whole new engineer, especially developing innovative strategies to intentionally promote growth of the professional person. By 2020, the program had achieved disruption, earning an ABET innovation award and being named an “emerging world leader in engineering education” in the Reimagining and Rethinking Engineering Education report. The latest evolution of the program combines on-line learning and work-based learning for a sustainable model that serves a culturally diverse nationwide audience of community college completers. This is a story of innovative curricula putting team-based project learning at its core. Promising strategies addressed in the paper include ABET outcomes, reflection, identity building, metacognition, teamwork, industry PBL, recruiting, learning communities, and continuous improvement. The conclusion puts a spotlight on where the program and engineering education in the U.S. needs to journey next

Applying Design Based Research to New Work-Integrated PBL Model (The Iron Range Engineering Bell Program)

A new project-based model of engineering education is being developed to deliver an upper-division (final two years of four-year bachelor degree) experience. The experience is centred on students working directly in industry through engineering apprentice (cooperative education/internship) employment. Students will work in industry, completing projects, for the last two years of their education while being supported in their technical and professional development by professors, facilitators, and their peers through use of digital communication. This new model focuses on learning being more imbedded in professional practice, in contrast to the more traditional model of engineering, where the learning about the profession is done in the abstract of a classroom. The learning experience is designed to open doors for greater access to engineering education. Developed for community college graduates (entering students who have completed first two years of engineering bachelor requirement) in the United States, the program will serve a more ethnically and gender diverse student body. The innovative new model focuses on the development of transversal competences, a new set of teacher roles in PBL, industry-university collaboration, curricular design, continuous evaluation of practice, use of e-learning, and the students\u27 learning processes. The program pilot starts July 2019. This paper will describe the new model, the design-based research method being used, report on the steps completed to date, introduce new sets of data on the new model, analyse the data, evaluate its impact, and result in the next iteration of design improvement. It will primarily focus on program development and the research approach for evaluation of the education model

Disrupting Engineering Education

Traditional engineering education approaches are recognizable around the world – lectures, tutorials, laboratories, some projects. With the emergence of Industry 4.0, the world in which engineers practice is evolving at an ever-increasing rate, combining a greater focus on complex sociotechnical problems with new technologies and increasingly powerful design tools. In general, the engineering curricula have not adapted quickly to this change, but there is a shift in expectations of who and what engineering students should be. Engineering curricula are becoming more flexible, as are the learning environments in which they are implemented. This chapter draws upon the Doblin 10 types of innovation model as a framework to unpack the different kinds of innovation inherent in these emerging forms of disruption. It identifies that innovation is mostly clustered in the configuration and experience of our degrees, rather than the degrees themselves, and shows that effective disruption requires combining several types of innovation to be successful. The chapter further addresses the disruption process itself, highlighting the continuous improvement mindset that is necessary to commence, continue, and sustain disruptive innovation in engineering education. It identifies potential barriers and how these can be overcome, ending with a call to action

The Bell Academy: A Bridge Semester Where Engineering Students Transform Into Student Engineers Who Thrive In Industry Placements

Iron Range Engineering is an innovative learning program using project-based and work-based pedagogies. The Bell Academy (BA) is a semester-long bridge experience between the first two years of STEM foundation and the final two years spent in full-time industry co-op placements. The curriculum within the academy is delivered within three domains: technical, design, and professional. The transformation to thriving as a student engineer in an industry placement is intentionally embedded in each stage of the program as students develop higher levels of self-awareness, professional responsibility, and self-directedness. Students not only gain technical engineering knowledge, but also apply that knowledge within team-based, ill-structured design projects, acting as engineering consultants to industry clients. Technical learning is delivered in one-credit modules, which supports both the development of the individual as a student engineer and the execution of the project. Professional competencies are learned in-situ as teams encounter natural struggles. Development is supported through workshops, which cover topics such as conflict management, leadership, technical writing, data science, public speaking, inclusive action, etc. Through iterative assignments and practice, such as resume development, negotiation, and interviewing, students develop a skills portfolio to identify and acquire a position to begin and maintain their career. Through more than a decade of implementation, several unique learning strategies have been developed and refined. The paper will briefly describe the model used and provide the strategies as potential tools for adaptation and implementation in engineering programs worldwide

Self-Directed Learning in PBL

Engineering education is at a crossroads. The desired attributes of the engineer of the future go beyond the strong analytical skills desired of engineers in the past. Future engineers must be creative, ingenious, and flexible. They must possess great skill as communicators and professionals. Above all, they must be accomplished, self-directed learners. Engineering education of the past provided explicit opportunities for students to develop strong analytical skills, but only implicit or worse, tacit, learning of these other important attributes. For our future engineers to develop high levels of skill and accomplishment, the days of engineering students having the majority of their time spent in lecture halls and doing closed-ended homework problems have to become a part of the past. If we want students to acquire complex skills, they need to spend much time practicing those skills and receiving ample formative feedback on their development. Project-based learning (PBL) is a pedagogy perfectly aligned with the developmental trajectory of an engineering student. In PBL, students work on teams applying engineering design processes to complex, open-ended problems. They develop interpersonal skills, conflict management strategies, and professional responsibility. They write technical engineering documents and give professional engineering presentations. Their motivations to learn become greater as they are given autonomy, realistic challenges, and opportunities to become connected to each other and their profession. They gain identity as emerging engineers. Most importantly, they take on the responsibility of managing their own learning of technical knowledge. They learn how to learn. They become self-regulated, metacognitive, self-directed learners. As a result, engineers who graduate from PBL curricula are more ready to enter engineering practice and look more like the desired engineer of the future. PBL engineering educations have been available to students in Europe for more than 40 years. In Denmark, the PBL engineering universities are renowned for graduating students with these skills and attributes. However, the dispersion of these models, especially to the United States, has been slow. Nearly 20 years ago, ABET published the a-k student outcomes, requiring engineering programs to graduate new engineers with many of the attributes listed above. Despite this, the pedagogies didn’t change and the attributes are not developed in the majority of engineering graduates. This chasm resulted in the initiation of an idea that turned into the development of a PBL model in the rural iron range region of Minnesota. Using the Aalborg model of PBL as a starting point, the Iron Range Engineering model of engineering education began in 2010. Through continuous improvement it has constantly evolved through the present day. This model of PBL is the backdrop for this study. Volume 1 takes a deep look at the theoretical underpinnings of themodel and provides a detailed description of both the model and the change processes involved in the model’s development. The skills associated with being a self-directed learner (SDL) and the relationships between PBL and the acquisition of SDL skills are the focus of the research study in Volume 2. The theoretical perspective aims to explore how metacognition, self-regulated learning, lifelong learning, and motivation impact self-directed learning development. The literature review identifies a strong positive correlation between self-directed learning development and PBL learning environments. Quantitative research was designed to study the graduates of the Iron Range Engineering program to identify if the correlation exists in that PBL environment and how it compares to graduates of traditional engineering programs. The correlation from the literature was confirmed. The PBL graduates achieved significant SDL development whereas the traditional graduates did not. This result prompted the development of a qualitative study to explore the ways in which the PBL graduates experienced self-directed learning. Two models of understanding are presented. The first is a phenomenographic outcome space that identifies the various ways students encounter self-directed learning. The second is a detailed composite model describing all of the elements of self-directed learning that the PBL graduates employ and the processes through which they do so. The results of this research provide opportunities for curriculum developers and engineering instructors to contemplate how PBL curricula can be used in the development of the engineering graduates of the future

Development of PBL Students as Self-Directed Learners

This research paper describes the study of the impact of a project-based learning (PBL) curriculum on the learners’ development of self-directed learning abilities. The motivation for this study is that self-directed learning (SDL) ability is positioned as one of the essential outcomes of engineering education. This can be seen in the following quote from the International Engineering Alliance: “The fundamental purpose of engineering education is to build a knowledge base and attributes to enable the graduate to continue learning and to proceed to formative development that will develop the competencies required for independent practice.” There are many terms that are used to describe the processes that are desired in and used by individuals when they acquire new knowledge. Metacognition, lifelong learning, self-regulated learning, and self-directed learning are among those terms most commonly used. The commonalities and differences of these concepts are presented in the paper in order to then describe the development of the self-directed learning abilities in undergraduate students. This research is grounded in the prior works of others who have studied the changes of engineering students’ SDL abilities across the four to five years of an undergraduate education. Prior studies by multiple researchers indicate students experiencing PBL curricula have experienced significant growth. These studies all used the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS), a commercially available tool that has been administered to 120,000 adults and as been used in over 90 PhD studies. The researchers developed qualitative study in an attempt to characterize how the PBL graduates experience self-directed learning. 27 PBL graduates were interviewed. A phenomenographic methodology was used to determine how the graduates experience SDL in their engineering practice. The result of the qualitative study is a set of six different “ways of experiencing”. In a phenomenography, the “ways of experiencing” are the outcome space. By studying and interpreting the different ways of experiencing, academic decision makers who are considering the implementation of PBL can contemplate how these results can impact their design decisions

From Nothing to Something

A national group of engineering educators at secondary, 2-year, and 4-year schools is developing a cooperative coali-tion to build effective alternative pathways for students to receive degrees in engineering. Collaborations are being formed to establish systems and implement methods with the goal of reversing the current trend of declining engi-neering enrollment and increasing the number of students from underrepresented groups who pursue engineering careers. The conference that initiated this project was held at Itasca Community College (ICC) because of the leadership and success that the college has demonstrated in achieving these goals

Student Experience for the Development of Professional Competencies in a Project Based Learning Curriculum

In the calls for change in engineering education there is an increased emphasis for the student development of professional competencies. This paper looks at the student experience when the development of professional competencies is made to bean explicit learning outcome for students in a project-based learning (PBL) curriculum that is designed purposefully to develop them. This study builds on a previous quantitative study that indicated an increase in performance of the professional competencies by students who experienced the PBL curriculum. This qualitative study is focused on gaining an understanding of the student experience and also identifying which elements of the PBL curriculum affected the student professional competency development experience. Of equal interest, in the qualitative study, is to gain an understanding of the student experience in how they developed their importance for the professional competencies. The quantitative study indicates this was developed prior to upper division. The paper contributes to the literature on engineering education and serves to inform engineering education faculty and decision makers who are intent on transforming their respective engineering education systems through project based learning with the insights into the ways this PBL curriculum influenced the student development of professional competencies