World of Engineering » engineering education

Chronicle of Higher Ed – Re-Engineering Engineering Education

Ed Eckel — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:24:23 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article on innovative ways to improve undergraduate retention in engineering.

Fischman, Josh. “Re-Engineering Engineering Education.” Chronicle of Higher Education Blog. February 19, 2012. Access via http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/re-engineering-engineering-education-to-retain-students/28745

Undergraduate Reading Groups in Engineering (MIT)

Ed Eckel — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 19:50:31 +0000

Students in electrical engineering and computer science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have set up voluntary reading groups to discuss scholarly technical papers in their fields. Read about the URGE (Undergraduate Reading Groups in Engineering) program here, and look at their wiki here. Initiated by electrical engineering/computer science senior Cathy Wu, these groups meet five times a semester to discuss papers relevant to their interests. Benefits include developing an undergraduate research community, learning how to read (and understand) a technical paper, and getting a sense of the literature in one’s chosen field. The program began in Fall 2011, and continues this spring. This is a very impressive program that hopefully students at other universities will consider emulating.

Synthesis Digital Library – REMINDER

Ed Eckel — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 20:24:36 +0000

A year ago, Waldo Library obtained collection one of the Synthesis Digital Library, containing 100 fifty to two hundred page books in engineering and computer science. Each of these books is basically an extended lecture, authored by an expert engineer, and available in Adobe PDF format for easy downloading, reading, printing, and emailing. This would make some of these books ideal to use as textbooks for the classes you teach. Here are some selected titles in the collection. You can see all the titles using the link above. Please take advantage of this collection! (Note: You will need to enter your BroncoNet ID and password to access these titles and the collection itself.)

Digital Control in Power Electronics (By Simone Buso and Paolo Mattavelli)

Engineering Ethics (By George D. Catalano)

Engineers within a Local and Global Society (By Caroline Baillie)

Essentials of Applied Mathematics for Scientists and Engineers (By Robert G. Watts)

Intelligent Autonomous Robotics: A Robot Soccer Case Study (By Peter Stone)

Learning Programming using MATLAB (By Khalid Sayood)

Power Electronics for Modern Wind Turbines (By Frede Blaabjerg and Zhe Chen)

Quantum Computing for Computer Architects (By Tzvetan S. Metodi and Frederic T. Chong)

RFID Explained (By Roy Want)

Understanding Circuits (By Khalid Sayood)

Video Engineering Lectures

Ed Eckel — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:30:25 +0000

Adrienne Carlson at Onlineengineeringdegrees.com has written a post providing links to a number of educational engineering related video lectures available on the web. You can read her post (and access her links) here.

URL: http://onlineengineeringdegrees.com/75-cutting-edge-lectures-for-engineers/

ACRL 2009 STS Research Forum Presentation

Ed Eckel — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:54:51 +0000

This coming Sunday July 12, I will presenting a paper at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, Ill. My presentation is entitled “Assumptions of Originality: Plagiarism, Patchwriting and the Engineering Master’s Thesis.” This presentation will be part of the ACRL Science Technology Section’s Research Forum, which will take place from 3:30-5:30pm that afternoon, in the Chicago Hilton Conference Room 4D.

You can view my presentation online here or by going to the following URL at Google Docs:

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ddsj5mvw_127cg4qv8fb

Three other papers will be given at that same research forum:

One Person, Many Responsibilities: An Analysis of Science and Technology Library Job Descriptions,” by John Meier, Pennsylvania State University.

“Rocket Science Can Be Understood: Librarians as STEM Faculty Outreach Partners,” by Melanie Sellar, Marymount College.

“The Case for a Scientific Institutional Repository: A View from the Laboratory,” by Cecelia Brown and June Abbas, University of Oklahoma, Norman.

If you a librarian who is interested in any of these issues, I hope you’ll stop by.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Ed Eckel — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:59:08 +0000

The “cultural issue of change” (to quote Dr. Sheri D. Sheppard at Stanford University”) in engineering education is the subject of a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (January 30, 2009). In “Engineering Schools Prove Slow to Change” By Paul Basken, engineering colleges are taken to task for being resistant to the changes needed to attract bright young minds (particularly female and under-represented minorities) and keep engineering education relevant in a changing professional world. The resistance of faculty to changes in teaching methods and curricula, as well as a continuing inability to show young people how engineering can matter, are among the issues discussed in this brief article.

You can read this article either online at the link above (if your institution has a subscription) or in the print edition January 30, 2009, Page A4.

Grand Challenges Identified – NAE

Ed Eckel — Thu, 29 May 2008 20:28:08 +0000

As a follow-up to my post from last year (“Grand Challenges for Engineering“, February 9, 2007) in which I discussed the initiative of the National Academy of Engineering to gather feedback from people all over the world regarding what they consider the ”Grand Challenges for Engineering”, the NAE has released a list of 14 grand challenges, as identified by their committee (and I assume the people who sent in feedback). You can view their challenges here. This exercise is a very valuable one in getting people to think constructively and creatively about our future – technological and otherwise. If we do not educate our engineers (and our children for God’s sake) to think integratively (is that a word?) and ethically about how to use technology to help solve the problems we face, we’re not long for this world.

You Know It. Can You Write It? By Thomas Grose

Ed Eckel — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 13:16:27 +0000

From ASEE Connect Newsletter March 2008

You Know It. Can You Write It? By Thomas K. Grose

This is a very interesting article by a frequent contributor to the ASEE Prism magazine on the need to improve the writing skills of undergraduate engineering students.

“Role-playing and debates are examples of innovative techniques that engineering faculty–often working with professional writing instructors–are using to sharpen student writing abilities. Educators argue that the best way to hone students’ writing skills is to insert more writing instruction into engineering curricula…”

NSF Report on Improving Engineering Education

Ed Eckel — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:39:49 +0000

The National Science Foundation published a report in November 2007 on the need to improve engineering education in the U.S. The report is called “Moving Forward to Improve Engineering Education” (NSB-07-122). You can access the report via the link above or the following URL: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsb07122/index.jsp

This report builds on the 2005 National Academy of Engineering report Educating the Engineer of 2020.

Both reports make the argument that American engineering education needs to retain more students, become more diverse both in terms of who enters the programs and who teaches those students, give students a sense of what is involved in engineering design early in the program (rather than in the fourth year), and train them to be creative, self-motivated thinkers with broad skill sets. Some of these changes are already taking place at Western’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which debuted a freshman level engineering design course in Fall 2005.

Thanks to John Hunter at the ASEE Engineering&… Blog for this posting idea.

Evaluating Engineering Dissertations

Ed Eckel — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:35:02 +0000

The educational researcher Dr. Barbara E. Lovitts has written a fascinating book on coming up with criteria to evaluate doctoral dissertations. Her new book is entitled Making the Implicit Explicit: Creating Performance Expectations for the Dissertation (Sterling: Stylus, 2007) and is located in our Education Library (Sangren Hall), call number LB 2369 .L685 2007. Chapter 9 of this book looks at criteria for electrical and computer engineering dissertations. To compile her criteria for outstanding, very good, acceptable, and unacceptable dissertations, she gathered a task force of 24 engineering faculty from 6 universities to discuss what qualities they looked for. This book should be required reading and discussion material for all faculty, especially those who serve on dissertation or thesis committees.

By the way, we are fortunate to have Dr. Lovitts come to speak at Western Michigan University on Monday April 7th, 2008, from 9 a.m to 11 a.m. in the Fetzer Center. The subject of her talk is: “How Do You Know a Good Dissertation When You See One?“