Uncovering Strategies to Improve Student Engagement and Enhance the Engineering Education Curriculum

Abstract It is imperative to understand the differences across the varieties of existing approaches being implemented to increase student engagement in the curriculum of engineering education. This understanding will help shed light on what works and what does not. Thus, a one-day workshop was convened with an uncommon assembly of stakeholders including professional engineers, engineering faculty, psychologists, pedagogy and educational scientists, students, curriculum developers, entrepreneurial evangelists, the diplomatic community and the industry to examine and create a comprehensive roadmap for including innovative ideas and best practices in curriculum enhancement designed to increase the engagement of engineering students. The need for this workshop is exacerbated by the novelty of integrating service learning and social innovation activities into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. This workshop identified proof-of-concept strategies for IUSE NSF's exploration and development (E&D) implementation framework. The workshop uncovered fundamental steps of design thinking because increasing the engagement of students is a classic human-centered opportunity. This opportunity prioritizes the engagement of the targeted stakeholders, rather than on experts who are often at a distance from the problems they seek to understand. This workshop took advantage of the academic discovery process through a series of brainstorming sessions and presentations to: (i) understand the nature of the problem around increasing student learning and engagement, and (ii) identify specific intervention strategies on how to integrate service learning and social innovation into an existing curriculum. The main outcomes of the workshop center on four themes. The first theme, "Rethinking Engineering Education," emphasizes the experiences of workshop participants on the transformations that have taken place in the last decade in engineering education. The efforts along the tracks of the changing direction was the focus of the second theme, "Emerging Frontiers and Trends in Student Engagement Strategies." The industry and non-academic participants at the workshop offered opportunities for potential social or community enhancing solutions or needs. The third theme, "Mechanisms of Integrating Service Learning and Social Innovation," builds on the trends to improve engagement by focusing on how education science can articulate steps toward using community needs to meet experiential learning goals and needs. The fourth theme of the workshop, "Towards a Way Forward," focused on closing the loop to synthesize the highlights and lessons learned from the Workshop.