STUDENTS AS THE KEY TO UNLEASHING STUDENT ENGAGEMENT: THE THEORY, DESIGN, LAUNCH OF A SCALABLE, STUDENT-RUN LEARNING COMMUNITY AT XX

摘要

Improving engineering education has been a recurring theme throughout the past century. Over the last two decades, calls for reform have intensified from many stakeholders at the global and local levels - including the National Academies, policy makers, faculty, employers, and students. Heroic faculty efforts have been broadly mounted and large amounts of money have been spent, but truly transformative change in engineering education remains an elusive goal. For example, a recent volume examines the many efforts made in the creation and execution of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Coalitions and finds that many useful curriculum modifications and pedagogical innovations were implemented, but those efforts, even when successful, remained largely local, failing to diffuse broadly to other institutions. Worse, many of the innovations that appeared to be working well reverted to prior form following the expenditure of NSF-provided funds. Engineering education is a complex system, and the difficulty in transforming it should, in one sense, come as no surprise; however, calls for reform largely prescribe similar solutions such as better emphasis on communications skills and teamwork in classrooms taught with greater pedagogical skill. It is a bit of a puzzle that such widespread agreement has not resulted in more effective and sustainable change and better diffusion and pace of change.