Engineering Leaders Conference 2014 on Engineering Education

Internships in firms are becoming more widespread, either as an integral part of higher education courses, (ranging from engineering to accounting and social work), or are sought out by students themselves. This paper reports on a four-year period (2010-2013) of internship practice at a technological university on the Greek island of Crete – where internships are a compulsory part of undergraduate courses – and analyses the experiential-learning process as experienced by the students, academics and business managers. The particular internship programmes are described in terms of goals and procedures regarding employment conditions and assesses the students, employers and the process itself through questionnaires. Finally, recommendations are made for the future of internship programmes based on this assessment so as to benefit all stakeholders.

Due to the social context of engineering classrooms, stereotype threat (STT) may play an essential role in the dearth of AA females in engineering. Empirical studies have confirmed the deleterious effects STT has on students' performance. However, acceptance of STT as more than a laboratory phenomenon necessitates an in-depth understanding of how stigmatized groups experience being socially devalued and negatively stereotyped. In this qualitative investigation, the Critical Race Theory tenet of counter-storytelling is applied to capture the narratives of AA females to comprehend how they resist or overcome STT and persist in engineering. Data from semi-structured interviews is used to assess what meaning AA female engineering students construct of events that trigger or protect them from STT. Findings suggest that AA females in engineering are certainly experiencing STT. Preliminary analysis reveal five characteristic themes shared by the participants: (1) excessive competitiveness with other students, especially other females; (2) being ‘invisible’ or an aversion of being identified by their gender and/or race; (3) discomfort with uncaring and unwelcoming environments; (4) silence and (5) reliance on received knowledge.

Engineering practice today has no geographical boundaries. When considering global challenges shared by all humans, collaboration between engineers around the globe becomes a requirement for the success of any proposed solution. Therefore, globally competent engineers are critical and needed in huge numbers to lead such collaborations. Nevertheless, preparing globally competent engineers requires equipping them with a solid and relevant technical base, coupled with a thorough and robust engineering ethics and professionalism understanding, which will allow them to quickly understand the human, societal, and local context of their practice, adapt to unexpected situations, and lead improvements and innovations. This set of skills in engineering, also known in the literature as soft or professional skills, falls within the area of engineering ethics and professionalism, which make up the umbrella covering all the qualitative and evolving aspects of engineering education and practice, and needed for leadership. These same aspects are prominently emphasized by accreditation standards for engineering education programs, like the accreditation criteria produced by ABET.

Literature includes many reports investigating the different issues related to global practice of engineering as well as attempts to formulate lists of attributes of a competent global engineer. The majority of these reports include common themes related to understanding and including the human and local context while practicing engineering, as well as the tools to handle this context gathered under the leadership skillset. A major reason is because most barriers to success in international engineering practice belong to this qualitative side of engineering and the context of practice.

This paper will discuss and summarize the common themes related to engineering ethics and professionalism education, for a global practice and leadership, and provide recommendations on the best practices to incorporate or update these themes in engineering education, based on multiple sources including the author's own research and findings.

With the exponential rate of development in technology for delivering education, we now stand at the gateway of seeing sweeping changes in how the engineering students are educated in the 21^st century. These techniques will need to be tailored to satisfy the needs of the generation of students who are now in college—better known as the millennial students. These students have some unique characteristics which make it difficult for them to derive maximum benefits from the traditional teaching methods with hour-long classroom lectures. They have developed short attention spans and so, when they are not interested in something, their attention quickly shifts somewhere else. As a result, their ideal learning environment has changed to shorter lectures, use of a variety of multimedia, and collaborating with their peers for maximum effectiveness. With the help of technology, it has been found that techniques such as the flipped classroom and on-line and hybrid offering of the class are helping today's students to become independent learners, an attribute that will be extremely useful in their future where lifelong learning has become an integral part of a person's working career.

For the past three years I have been offering two math-based courses as a hybrid class using the inverted classroom model. During this period, I have offered 15 sections to about 400 students with extreme success. In my presentation I will discuss the changes which I have made in my courses to teach them as a “paperless” class using technology. I will also relate my experiences with these courses and the improvement in results obtained from this change.

Graduates of engineering programs in today's globalized economy must be able to apply their technical knowledge in team-based environments where flexibility, communication, and cooperation are needed to solve problems that do not necessarily have well-defined technical boundaries. Despite the importance of soft skills, research indicates that students in engineering programs are not satisfied with the soft skills training they receive at the university level. In order to better integrate soft skills and technical knowledge in the university curriculum, the mode of instruction must veer away from traditional lecture-based models to more student-centered and project-based approaches.

At the Petroleum Institute (PI), an engineering university in Abu Dhabi, the identification of core professional skills is an ongoing process that involves the integration of technical knowledge with soft skills training to prepare graduates for work in the oil and gas industry. These skills include communication (oral, written, and graphical), teamwork, project management, critical thinking, and lifelong learning. Given the interdisciplinary and global nature of the industry, these skills are essential for engineers to be successful in the field.

This paper discusses the process of mapping the engineering professional skills across three curriculum levels in the Arts and Sciences Program at the PI. It also includes feedback from students who completed the target courses to show how they perceive the growth of their own professional skills as engineering students and their level of preparedness for work in the oil and gas industry.

Neither current engineering curricula, nor existing professional and international development organizations, will be sufficient to create engineers who can productively engage with the grand challenges and the ‘wicked’ problems in which they are embedded. There is a need to develop multi-disciplinary coursework and extracurricular learning experiences, and enacting these changes can benefit from a new type of institution, ‘topical networks’, that support local coursework and extracurricular activities and connect multiple stakeholders and disciplines around broad and important topics. We describe potential benefits to three core stakeholder groups - students, faculty, and universities - from engaging with such an organization, using the case study of Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW).

Networks help students by improving the resilience of local chapters and supporting projects through grants or mentorship, provide faculty with curriculum materials that can be localized to avoid designing bespoke courses in a resource-scarce environment, and allow universities to leverage a broader geographic and disciplinary scope to find people or partners that are not locally available. Topical networks also focus on enabling all three of these groups to share knowledge about best practices and benefit from others' experience. The presence of topical networks at a college or university can provide separate value from professional societies or international development groups while collaborating with them at the local level, and simultaneously address barriers to change within the existing curriculum.

Despite the wide spread of modern teaching techniques such as the flipped classroom and blended learning, most still provide one-way feedback, from the instructor to the student. A new teaching approach – the micro-Adaptive Instruction (mAI) – isa presented in this paper. Through mAI the instructor can adapt lecture content based on student feedback and additional detailed information on their learning progress. mAI is mainly based on a multimedia platform that delivers the course material, and monitors and tracks students’ activities. The instructor is now aware of the specific topics that need to be addressed and clarified, so the lectures can be carried out more efficiently. This new approach has been tested and demonstrated on a module of Chemical Engineering Fluid Operations course (CHEN 304) at Texas A&M University at Qatar. Three evaluation metrics were implemented during and at the end of the demonstration. All metrics showed improvement at both the comprehension level and perception of the students. Around 80% of the students agreed that the collected information helped the instructor to properly adapt the lectures to their needs, while 87% believed that the platform enhanced their understanding. On average, students spent 34 active minutes on the platform while 23% spent more than 60 minutes. In spite of all the positive feedback and impact of this approach, it should be noted that significant effort might be necessary to upgrade existing teaching material to the level of the presented platform. On the other hand, this is a process that can take place gradually or even be directly adopted by educational publishers.

This work emphasizes novel ways to teach and learn which can be developed by most instructors provided that they have the patience and interest to produce class innovations using computers. The specific approach followed is known as “learning-by-doing in a virtual environment”. The basic idea is to train students to do sophisticated tasks in a way similar to what an expert would do, and the only way to verify if the learner has learned a lesson is to ask her to perform a task in a specific situation. The learning modules developed include a problem statement, with the specific tasks that the participant is required to accomplish. The system allows following of multiple paths in order to gather information and expert advice. There is a virtual library, in which literature related to the case is available; a computer room, in which computations can be carried out to obtain new data for the case; there is expert advice, in which typical questions related to the topic are responded by virtual experts in this field; and there is a navigation dimension, in which the participant can interact with the case by asking questions to virtual characters, exploring data specific for this case, going to a virtual field, and others. As a result, the participant should provide her response to the problem statement which originated the study. Construction of the navigation tool is made by means of a web-page with a tree structure. A number of simulations have been implemented, with differences in contents and also in complexity. This work addresses the National Academies Grand Challenge of “Advancing Personalized Learning”.

In engineering, thermodynamics is the science of energy. This includes traditional and alternative sources of energy and energy availability, conversion and transmission. Practical engineering issues such as the efficiency of thermodynamic processes and systems are also covered in engineering thermodynamics courses. As the world is becoming more aware of the impeding energy crisis, a rounded understanding of thermodynamics by the engineers of 2020 is vital for addressing this global issue. Despite the importance of the subject, past and current engineering students worldwide struggle with thermodynamics as indicated by the pertinent literature. Student's difficulties with thermodynamics have been reported in several European countries, the US, Australia and India. Indeed, understanding the root causes of problems with teaching/learning thermodynamics is a requisite first step toward any solution, e.g., a design of effective new instructional strategies, curricula and textbooks. This paper provides a concise account of the pertinent literature, and analyzes this literature in order to accurately frame the problems of learning (and teaching) thermodynamics. The paper describes methods used for probing these problems and attempts to solve them.

Working in groups and managing projects are important professional skills for engineers, and there is a growing demand to teach and assess such skills. But what should be taught and when? Tuckman's famous “stages of development of performing groups” provides a framework for understanding the types of challenges which groups face. Yet, as with any abstract model, it will not be transferred into students' practice if they do not see it as relevant to their lived experiences.

In 2014, a new course exploring the nexus of social and engineering issues in relation to the global challenges facing humanity was added to the obligatory program for all first year engineering students. Among the many noble goals of this course, in addition to gaining a more nuanced view of the global challenges from both an engineering and social science perspective, are the development of transversal skills such as team work, communication, presentation, library research and ethical engagement.

The taught material about team work was presented online, allowing for the use learning analytics on students' online responses to assess how well the “stages of group formation” literature matched students' experiences. It also allowed us to consider how students' perceptions of the challenges they will face differed from challenges they actually did face, as well as the implications of this for how they should be taught about group processes.