Collaborative Research: Finding Personal Meaning and Societal Connections in Engineering Education: A Case Study in Integrated Course Transfer

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This engineering education research project seeks to understand the barriers to inter-institutional diffusion of educational innovations by examining transfer issues for a successful engineering course from Olin College of Engineering to California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. Challenges to transfer will be explored using models from existing educational, organizational, and social change literature. The two goals of this project are to develop a method for characterizing the challenges that engineering educators face in disseminating curricular advances, and measuring whether the advances to student learning seen at one institution transfer to the partner school.The broader significance and importance of this project is to explore why years of repeated demonstrations of successful courses, pedagogies, and educational models have not spread broadly across the education system. The course to be transferred links engineering content to the social and historical contexts which define and frame engineering problems, a model which potentially can help recruiting and retaining women in engineering. Beyond addressing the barriers to transfer, the course content addresses the emerging vision of revising engineering education to better address complex global problems called for by recent national panels.