Infusing Real World Experiences into Engineering Education

We will directly engage engineering deans and faculty in a collaborative process to solicit and highlight successful models of integrating real world experiences into engineering education. Prior to the solicitation, our Advisory Committee, consisting of both industry and academic members, will develop its review criteria and promulgate guidance to nominators. Nominations will be gathered via website until January, 2012. The system will seek characterization of the efforts as well as indication of documented success in enhancing student performance. The committee will select up to 30 of the most exemplary nominees to showcase in a printed guide (estimated to be a one-page spread for each exemplar).

We will also gather feedback from engineering deans who have expressed a desire to infuse real world experiences into engineering classrooms. We will share the collected models with a sample of deans to discuss the impediments they see in adapting these models to their institutions. We will engage these deans in identifying new program models that might address their concerns. The results of this feedback will be posted to the NAE website, distributed electronically, incorporated within the printed guide of best practices a brief summary of the suggestions by the deans for augmenting or extending the exemplary models to aid their broader adaptation.

The guide will be distributed to each engineering dean and department chair in the United States, faculty members committed to educational excellence and innovation (e.g., attendees of Frontiers of Engineering Education and faculty at 11 universities working to use the NAE’s Grand Challenges as a framework to better prepare engineering students for the 21st Century, as well as made available to organizations of engineering employers who have expressed specific interest in enhancing real world experiential learning by engineering students (e.g., the Corporate Member Council of the American Society for Engineering Education, the Business and Industry STEM Coalition, and the Change the Equation group, which includes AMD). The distribution of the guide is expected to inform a variety of audiences about best practices and to provide an incentive to solicited academic institutions to engage in a friendly competition to showcase their model programs to potential partners as well as identify those features and circumstances that have made their models successful. For those institutions that have not developed their own models, it will also serve to inform them about best practices with sufficient information that they could adapt one or more existing models to their own campus objectives.