This paper describes an evidence based-practice paper to a formative response to the engineering faculty and students’ needs at Anonymous University.
Within two weeks, the pandemic forced the vast majority of the 1.5 million faculty and 20 million students nationwide to transition all courses from face-to-face to entirely online. Never in the history of higher education has there been a concerted effort to adapt so quickly and radically, nor have we had the technology to facilitate such a rapid and massive change. At Anonymous University, over 700 engineering educators were racing to transition their courses. Many of those faculty had never experienced online course preparation, much less taught one synchronously or asynchronously. Faculty development centers and technology specialists across the university made a great effort to aid educators in this transition. These educators had questions about the best practices for moving online, how their students were affected, and the best ways to engage their students. However, these faculty’s detailed questions were answerable only by faculty peers’ experience, students’ feedback, and advice from experts in relevant engineering education research-based practices. This paper describes rapid, continuous, and formative feedback provided by the Engineering Education Faculty Group (EEFG) to provide an immediate response for peer faculty guidance during the pandemic, creating a community of practice. The faculty membership spans multiple colleges in the university, including engineering, education, and liberal arts.
The EEFG transitioned immediately to weekly meetings focused on the rapidly changing needs of their colleagues. Two surveys were generated rapidly by Hammond et al. to characterize student and faculty concerns and needs in March of 2020 and were distributed through various means and media. Survey 1 and 2 had 3381 and 1506 respondents respectively with most being students, with 113 faculty respondents in survey 1, the focus of this piece of work. The first survey was disseminated as aggregated data to the College of Engineering faculty with suggested modifications to course structures based on these findings. The EEFG continued to meet and collaborate during the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester and has continued through to this day. This group has acted as a hub for teaching innovation in remote online pedagogy and techniques, while also operating as a support structure for members of the group, aiding those members with training in teaching tools, discussion difficult current events, and various challenges they are facing in their professional teaching lives.
While the aggregated data gathered from the surveys developed by Hammond et al. was useful beyond measure in the early weeks of the pandemic, little attention at the time was given to the responses of faculty to that survey. The focus of this work has been to characterize faculty perceptions at the beginning of the pandemic and compare those responses between engineering and non-engineering faculty respondents, while also comparing reported perceptions of pre- and post-transition to remote online teaching. Interviews were conducted between 4 members of the EEFG with the goal of characterizing some of the experiences they have had while being members of the group during the time of the pandemic utilizing Grounded theory qualitative analysis.
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Cultivating a culture of scholarly teaching and learning: An ecological approach to institutional change in engineering education
Over the past two decades, there has been a significant increase in the production of engineering education research. Worldwide, this increase is reflected in the growing number of papers that are submitted to engineering education-focused conferences; engineering education-focused journal outlets; and the increasing number of new schools and departments of engineering education, and tenure-track faculty positions opening up in the United States.
In spite of these developments, it is often argued that there remains a gap between engineering education research and educational practice. Some studies attribute this gap to a focus on the dissemination of evidence-based practices, as opposed to working with instructors to adapt evidence-based practices to “fit” into new contexts (Froyd et al., 2017). Other research points to the need for broader cultural change, for example at the level of the school or department, in order to create the conditions that enable and encourage instructors to sustainably engage with scholarly teaching and learning practices (Henderson, Beach, & Finkelstein, 2011).
In this paper, we describe a novel institutional model, currently embodied in the Engineering Education Transformations Institute (EETI) at the University of Georgia (UGA), which is designed to create such conditions (Morelock, Walther, & Sochacka, 2019). Philosophically, our model is based on a propagation (versus a dissemination) paradigm (Froyd et al., 2017), grounded in a strengths (Saleebey, 2012) (versus a deficit) approach to existing instructional capacity, and broadly informed by complex systems theory (Laszlo, 1996; Meadows & Wright, 2008). Practically, the model leverages ecological design principles (Hemenway, 2009) to inform the day-to-day operations of the effort. This paper describes these philosophical and practical underpinnings and investigates the following research question:
How can ecological design principles be operationalized to cultivate a culture of innovative and scholarly teaching and learning in a college of engineering?
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- Award ID(s):
- 1927341
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10188266
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Australian Association for Environmental Education
- ISSN:
- 0158-944X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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The cases illustrate “multiple truths” (Arghode, 2012) with regard to high school level engineering teaching and embody diversity from the perspective of high school teachers. We will highlight themes across cases in the context of frameworks that represent teacher experience conceptualizing race, ethnicity, and diversity of students. We will also present salient features from each case that connect to potential recommendations for advancing P-12 engineering education efforts. These findings will impact how diversity support is practiced at the high school level and will demonstrate specific novel curricular and pedagogical approaches in engineering education to advance P-12 mentoring efforts.more » « less
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Objective Over the past decade, we developed and studied a face-to-face video-based analysis-of-practice PD model. In a cluster randomized trial, we found that the face-to-face model enhanced elementary science teacher knowledge and practice, and resulted in important improvements to student science achievement (student treatment effect, d = 0.52; Taylor et al., 2017: Roth et al., 2018). The face-to-face PD model is expensive and difficult to scale. In this poster, we present the results of a two-year design-based research study to translate the face-to-face PD into a facilitated online PD experience. The purpose is to create an effective, flexible, and cost-efficient PD model that will reach a broader audience of teachers. Perspective/Theoretical Framework The face-to-face PD model is grounded in situated cognition and cognitive apprenticeship frameworks. Teachers engage in learning science content and practices in the context in which they will be teaching. In addition, there are scaffolded opportunities for teachers to learn from model videos by experienced teachers, try model units, and ultimately develop their own unit, with guidance. The PD model also attends to the key features of effective PD as described by Desimone (2009) and others. We adhered closely to the design principles of the face-to-face model as described by Roth et al., 2018. Methods We followed a design-based research approach (DBR: Cobb et al., 2003: Shavelson et al., 2003) to examine the online program components and how they promoted or interfered with the development of teachers’ knowledge and reflective practice. Of central interest was the examination of mechanisms for facilitating teacher learning (Confrey, 2006). To accomplish this goal, design researchers engaged in iterative cycles of problem analysis, design, implementation, examination, and redesign (Wang & Hannafin, 2005). Data We iteratively designed, tested, and revised 17 modules across three pilot versions. Three small groups of teachers engaged in both synchronous and asynchronous components of the larger online course. They responded to surveys and took part in interviews related to the PD. The PD facilitators took extensive notes after each iteration. The development team met weekly to discuss revisions. Results We found that community building required the same incremental trust-building activities that occur in face-to-face PD. Teachers began with low-risk activities and gradually engaged in activities that required greater vulnerability (sharing a video of themselves teaching a model unit for analysis and critique by the group). We also identified how to contextualize technical tools with instructional prompts to allow teachers to productively interact with one another about science ideas asynchronously. As part of that effort, we crafted crux questions to surface teachers’ confusions or challenges related to content or pedagogy. Facilitators leveraged asynchronous responses to crux questions in the synchronous sessions to push teacher thinking further than would have otherwise been possible in a 2-hour synchronous video-conference. Significance Supporting teachers with effective, flexible, and cost-efficient PD is difficult under the best of circumstances. In the era of COVID-19, online PD has taken on new urgency. AERA members will gain insight into the construction of an online PD for elementary science teachers/ Full digital poster available at: https://aera21-aera.ipostersessions.com/default.aspx?s=64-5F-86-2E-15-F8-C3-C0-45-C6-A0-B7-1D-90-BE-46more » « less
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