PROJECT SUMMARY
Since engineering education stands at a crossroads, curricular reform efforts are of paramount importance to the future of the discipline and ultimately, the United States and global technological economies. The proposed effort seeks to do for Electrical Engineering at Northern Arizona University what needs to be done throughout undergraduate engineering education, a restructuring and revitalizing of the curriculum to achieve the following goals: 1) equip students for future successful careers that require a broader and more effective foundation that embraces emerging technologies, 2) attract and meet the educational needs of all students, particularly under-represented Native Americans and other minorities, by creating an active, investigative and cooperative learning environment that emphasizes modeling, simulation, analysis and computation skills and 3) attract and retain high caliber students by removing legacy material and methods and infusing the curriculum with 1) modern, more relevant material in emerging technologies like Biology and 2) modern software and learning tools.
Three interrelated pilot efforts are necessary to accomplish these core goals. The first pilot creates a cross-disciplinary biological engineering emphasis within electrical engineering. Two of the co-PI’s (Flikkema and Leid) have extensive experience from each side of this cross-disciplinary effort and are founding members of the university-wide Center for Biotechnology and Human Welfare at NAU. The second pilot addresses a current weakness in the curriculum in computing and seeks to strengthen it by developing higher-level skills in modeling, simulation, analysis and visualization. Each of the faculty involved, Blakey, Scott and Mlsna, have complementary experience and have produced educational innovation in this area. The third pilot, investigative reasoning, seeks to break out of the exposition-application educational paradigm and develop high level thinking and reasoning skills to make learners less dependent and more able to create the innovative solutions required today. The three faculty championing this area have either been awarded the Boeing Outstanding Educator Award (Hatfield and Scott in 1999) or the College of Engineering Teacher of the Year (St. Omer in 2003).
A key aspect of this curricular reform is to create a continuous improvement process that uses assessment to identify legacy material and out-dated educational methods. They are replaced by more relevant material (often from emerging technologies) and modern learning activities (that are sensitive to diverse cultures and learning styles) from threads that are woven into courses across the curriculum. Threads were chosen as the best way to permeate the entire curriculum with a concept, idea, principle or learning method. This innovative thread-based approach is unique to our proposal and 1) does not require new courses, 2) integrates the curriculum together and 3) is more easily disseminated to other departments and institutions. This thread-based curricular reform process is the central feature of the intellectual merit of this proposal.
This effort will have a major impact on engineering education by 1) creating transferable models for continuous improvement curricular reform and cross-disciplinary collaboration, 2) creating new learning tools and methodologies to better attract, retain and educate an increasingly diverse student population, 3) developing advanced computational, modeling, simulation and visualization skills, and 4) developing higher level thinking and reasoning skills. NAU’s College of Engineering, Forestry and Natural Sciences is a proven leader in undergraduate engineering education and has not only the resources, but also new energetic leadership at the departmental level (Peter Blakey, one of the co-PI’s) and at the Dean’s level in Duane Abata, the incoming president of the American Society of Engineering Educators.
Proceed to Section I:Institutional Background
THE PILOT THREADS
Click on the links for a detailed account on each of the threads in this innovative approach, taken from the planning grant.
#1: Cross-disciplinary Biological Engineering
#2: Computation, Modeling, Simulation and Visualization
#3: Investigative Reasoning
CURRENT/PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS: Click here to find out why this is important to you!
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