Search for: All records

Failure analysis is central to the work of engineers, and yet we neglect to analyze our failures in the field of engineering education. In this paper, we examine our failure in the development and deployment of an immersive faculty experience for graduate students in engineering education. Professional development is a significant focus of graduate studies. Professional development broadly defined includes any activities supporting the acquisition of skills, knowledge, and abilities relevant to one’s current or desired position. In the context of graduate studies, professional development often involves such activities as conference or workshop attendance, internships or job exploration, mentoring or coaching directed at students, and certification programs. Despite the importance of professional development in graduate school, anecdotal and research-based evidence supports the assertion that graduate students experience professional development unevenly. Whether this unevenness results from intrinsic or extrinsic factors is not established. We investigate the barriers to participation in professional development, with a focus on an immersive faculty internship; however, this work revealed barriers associated with professional development in general and related to specific other types of professional development. We focus on barriers specifically because engineers examine both successes and failures in the effort to improve product design, and because our product—an immersive faculty experience for graduate students—was designed to overcome barriers identified during customary discovery research. For this analysis of failure, we rely on interviews and survey data from varied stakeholders (e.g., graduate students, their mentors, graduate program directors, representatives from grant-giving organizations, and faculty on hiring committees) to identify these barriers. We also share our personal reflections on the challenges associated with this effort. From the data collected from members of the engineering education community, we found that barriers to participation include time spent away from support systems, potential delays in graduation, lack of understanding of the value of professional development, and funding for participating in these opportunities. Graduate students perceive (rightly or wrongly) that their advisors do not support an immersive, off-site professional development experience, perhaps because advisors want graduate students to continue the work important to advisors or the advisors do not consider the experience valuable for cultivating the students’ professional identities. In addition, organizational challenges include facilitating a multi-site experience from a single institution that is subject to both institutional and NSF rules for budgeting. Stakeholders in graduate education have a significant interest in removing barriers to professional development, including opportunities like immersive internships. By doing so, they increase graduate students’ satisfaction with the graduate school experience and improve graduate students’ placement and career success. We connect our failure to both the concept of root cause failure analysis and the literature in organizational change. By doing so, we highlight how failure is an under-appreciated experience in the field of engineering education. 

The Rising Engineering Education Faculty Experience program (REEFE) is a professional development program that connects graduate students in engineering education with faculty members at teaching-focused institutions. The program goal is to simultaneously support faculty growth in engineering education and graduate student growth as academic change agents. Our program has transitioned from a partnership between one engineering education graduate program and one engineering institution to a consortium of engineering education graduate programs that sends students to multiple institutions across the country. The REEFE Consortium also developed a unique partnership with the Making Academic Change Happen initiative to offer continuous training to graduate students during their REEFE experience. Many positive outcomes have come from the development of the REEFE Consortium, including better graduate training in research at the coordinating institution, a better understanding of program logistics, and new and strengthened professional relationships. We discovered a number of challenges associated with providing intensive professional development opportunities to graduate students, including timing of experiences relative to degree progress, loss of connection to the home research community, and financial impact, especially as it relates to travel and housing. While a search of existing literature in professional development in higher education has provided best practices for existing programs, there is little to no available research highlighting barriers that exist to offering different types of professional development opportunities to graduate student populations. These barriers are important to highlight as they provide critical information needed in the design and decision making for those seeking to create useful professional development opportunities for graduate populations. This paper provides an updated description of the Rising Engineering Education Faculty Experience program as we attempt to scale the program. We summarize the existing literature on barriers to participation in professional development opportunities for graduate students. Finally, we describe how REEFE both addresses and fails to address these barriers. 

In this theoretical paper, we highlight the scholarship of integration by exploring how customer discovery connects to other methodologies in engineering education research and the opportunities for using this methodology in engineering education research. As a result of the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) and I-Corps for Learning initiatives, the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery methodology has grown in popularity within academic institutions, particularly in business and entrepreneurship education. In addition, the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery approach has helped startups, individuals, academics, and students test the potential of an idea, make important decisions about the structure, value, and implementation of their projects, and develop a minimum viable product, service, or offering. While the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery approach is relatively new to the fields of business, engineering education, and entrepreneurship education, its methodological background emerges from well-established qualitative research techniques. We first describe the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery process and give examples of its current use in academia. Next, we explain the connections between the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery approach and specific forms of qualitative research like design-based research, action research, and qualitative interviewing. Finally, we offer a detailed example of how our team used the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery approach to conduct an engineering education action research project. This example serves to clarify how the Lean LaunchPad®/Customer Discovery approach can be successfully applied, validated by funding received after our use of the process to develop a program. We expect that this theoretical work will add value to individuals interested in conducting action-oriented educational research projects for two reasons. First, we show how robust qualitative research methodologies provide the foundation for a popular market research approach. Second, we give an example of using this approach in an educational context. Our motivation is to expand the breadth of methodologies available to researchers and practitioners.