Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation

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IEEI Activities and Programs

Internal faculty brown bag lunches

Brown bag lunches will be held twice monthly for engineering, math, and physics faculty at College Station starting in the spring of 2018. This will give faculty and Engineering Academic and Student Affairs directors opportunities for sharing engineering education classroom experiences, as well as research data. The meetings will also provide mentoring for writing successful proposals. Each brown bag lunch will be limited to about 20 persons: Contact the Institute for Engineering Education & Innovation (IEEI) team, at ieei@tamu.edu.

IEEI Proposal Writing Community of Practice: An IEEI Fall 2020 Pilot Program

Purpose:

The College of Engineering consists of the best engineering educators in the world. Many faculty are trying new innovative approaches, and getting excellent results in this classroom, but many of these approaches are not being systematically evaluated and do not result in publications about the results. This project aims to start a pilot program to help researchers in engineering education break into the world of funded engineering education research.

Benefit:

A grant can help you accomplish this by providing the funds to obtain the resources you need to accomplish your innovative idea. A grant commonly provides two months of salary support to the researchers, which can be used either for additional summer salary or to buy out teaching commitments. Additionally, it can provide funds for graduate student researchers to assist with classroom implementation details and facilitate the data analysis and publication.

Expected Outcomes:

  • Participants will learn how to find the appropriate funding initiative
  • Participants will learn how to go after grant funding for future initiatives
  • Participants will learn how to write an NSF proposal
  • Participants will learn how to formulate NSF documents
  • Participants will learn about learning and other theories
  • Participants will learn how to ground their research within other theories
  • Participants will learn how to identity what are the gaps in the literature
  • Participants will learn how to perform a literature review to put their work in context
  • Participants will learn how to write assessment plans
  • Participants will learn how to write strong broader impacts
  • Participants will learn how to write strong intellectual merit
  • Participants will learn the value of mixed methods and how to assess them
  • Participants will become acquainted with various research methodologies common in engineering education
  • Participants will learn how to find the best collaborators to ensure the success of their project.

Timing:

Once a week sessions 9:30-11:30 on Fridays during the fall semester starting September 18th, extending to December 18, 2020.

Note: If TEES Engineering Education Certificate is in place by the Fall 2020, this program will earn you credit in that program.

Participation Requirements:

  • You must participate in all of the classes.
  • You must currently show excellence in your teaching.
  • You must have interest in publishing in engineering education.
  • You must be willing and able to perform a scientific study in your classroom in 2021.
  • You must complete a final report of your result.
  • You must complete a proposal draft for an NSF grant proposal.

You must agree for your proposal to be submitted through IEEI and include funds to IEEI so that IEEI can effectively support your completion of the project if it is awarded.

Stipend:

At the completion of the program, you will receive $500 in restricted funds to support your continued research in engineering education (not for personal salary). Additionally, graduated fellows will be eligible to apply for additional funds for innovative pilot projects.

If you have any questions, please contact ieei@tamu.edu.

IEEI Virtual Peer Coaching Program (Fall 2020 Community of Practice)

Student evaluations are lacking in the ability to effectively evaluate courses. Peer evaluations can help with that process as well as provide more substantive feedback to the instructor on how to improve their teaching. Previous peer evaluations required peer evaluators to sit in the background of the class while the person teaches. This can be awkward for the teacher and the students in the class, artificially affecting the normal teaching environment. With the move to online teaching, this affords us the opportunity to evaluate teaching asynchronously, using videos of the course lectures for analysis after the fact.

Additionally, teaching portfolios can be difficult to create and perfect.  Digital portfolios are now becoming the norm, but many teachers don’t know where to start in the creation of it. In this program, virtual peer teaching fellows will be chosen to work closely with members of the CTE to 1)  improve their own and the other participants teaching, 2) build and improve your own electronic portfolio, and 3) develop and evaluate a new model of peer evaluation that we hope will be more effective for both the students and the teachers.

Expected outcomes:

  • Identify a plan to make a program to have these outcomes.
  • Improved teaching of the participants.
  • Improved knowledge of how to evaluate classes by the participants.
  • A tested model for evaluating virtual classes.
  • A set of metrics that can be used for outreach to inform department heads and other administrators as per how to understand the data.
  • New knowledge about what makes for effective teaching in virtual classrooms.
  • Participants will build or improve their electronic teaching portfolio.

Timing:

Once a week session 1-3 pm Fridays during the fall semester, starting September 18, 2020 through December 18th, 2020.

Participation Requirements:

  • You must have existing video footage of your classroom teaching.
  • You must participate in all of the sessions.
  • You must be dedicated to improving your teaching.
  • You must share at least two videos of your teaching with the group.
  • You must complete a final report detailing the effect of the program on your teaching.
  • This activity should be in alignment with your appointment.

To support your participation in this program, at the completion of the program, you will receive $500 in restricted funds to support the continued improvement of your teaching (not for personal salary).

If you have any questions, please contact ieei@tamu.edu.

Seminars

IEEI sponsored seminar series – The IEEI Seminars in Engineering Education feature nationally recognized subject matter experts in engineering education from classroom faculty and lecturers to researchers in the field. Approximately four to five seminars will be scheduled per year. Lectures will be provided to the Texas A&M Experiment Education Station (TEES) system through live video streaming, and past lectures will be released when they are available.

2018/2019 Guest Lectures Series

2020/2021 Guest Lectures Series

IEEI sponsored Texas A&M/TEES internal workshop

Beginning in the fall of 2018, IEEI will sponsor a one-day workshop for the Engineering Education Professional Development for faculty of the College of Engineering and the College of Science, TEES wide. The workshop will include a keynote speaker, presentations of Texas A&M engineering education research that has been published, and breakout groups sharing successful engineering education strategies.

Texas A&M/TEES IEEI sponsored national conference

Beginning in 2019, Texas A&M/TEES IEEI will sponsor an Annual Engineering Education Conference and Workshop on the Texas A&M College Station campus. Each conference will have a focused theme and be complimentary to the American Society of Engineering Education’s annual meeting.

IEEI Fellows

Twelve engineering faculty were invited to be the inaugurating selection for the 2018/2019 IEEI Fellows.

2018/2019 Fellows

Engineering Education Faculty

The Faculty of Engineering Education of Texas A&M University is an interdisciplinary faculty composed of members from various departments and colleges of Texas A&M University. The administrative location of this faculty is the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation, a joint institute of TAMU and TEES. This faculty is to provide a collaborative structure for faculty of Texas A&M University who have interests in research and innovation for engineering, engineering technology, and computer science education

2019/2020 Engineering Education Faculty Executive Committee

Active Learning in Engineering Program (ALEP)

Active learning is generally defined as any instructional method that engages students in the learning process. In short, active learning requires students to do meaningful learning activities and think about what they are doing (metacognition). While this definition is fairly broad, typically active learning refers to activities that are designed and used to enhance the classroom experience (Prince, 2004).

Research has shown that students engage better with content and show enhanced learning in active learning classrooms (Lima et. al. 2016; Prince et. al., 2012; Stump et. al, 2011). In addition it has also been shown that student learning shows an appreciable measure of improvement when measured on concept inventories even when students reported not learning on surveys (Nguyen et. al 2016). A comprehensive meta-analysis of the literature by Freeman et. al. in 2016 provided the most compelling evidence for the use and adoption of active learning strategies. This analysis across 225 studies showed that students in traditional lecture courses were 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in designed active learning courses.

Program Goal

The Active Learning in Engineering Program aims to prepare and support faculty to incorporate active learning strategies into their teaching. The program aids faculty in assimilating active learning pedagogies into their existing courses. The program is useful for all instructors teaching in any kind of classroom space – whether in the newly renovated ZACH (https://zachry.tamu.edu/) or a different building on campus.

Facilitation Team

The Active Learning in Engineering Program is a collaboration between the College of Engineering, the Center for Teaching Excellence.