Transforming Undergraduate Learning to Enhance Innovation for a Changing World

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This project aims to serve the national interest by developing a new model for designing and delivering innovation-focused undergraduate STEM education. Undergraduate education today is typically fractured into multiple different colleges and departments. As a result, students often have limited opportunities to develop important skills, such as innovating in multidisciplinary teams, considering human elements in problem-solving, and transforming ideas into reliable investments of time and resources. To make such opportunities more available, this Level 1 Institutional and Community Transformation project aims to build a transdisciplinary, scalable model for innovation-focused undergraduate learning that crosses academic units and student majors. This model will include a student-centered, cross college/department community of practice to design and co-teach innovation-focused undergraduate courses. A key feature of the project is collaboration among academic units to develop courses that include engineering/technology/design issues, the human and cultural interface of liberal arts/social sciences, and the economic perspectives of business management. This context is expected to focus student learning on real problems in ways that span courses and course levels. The project will simultaneously study institutional barriers to this change in undergraduate education. Taken as a whole, the project may yield insights and suggest next steps for other institutions that seek to engage in large-scale educational transformations. This project is designed to leverage strengths of Purdue University’s Polytechnic Institute, College of Liberal Arts, and Krannert School of Management to create leading-edge, innovation-focused undergraduate learning experiences. First, the project will implement a design-based research approach to create, test, and refine an educational model for transforming traditional siloed undergraduate learning experiences into experiences that span across disciplines and academic departments/individual courses. This model is expected to provide the institutional structure for achieving transformative undergraduate learning through the implementation of evidence-based practices. Synergistically, the community of practice, which includes faculty, administrators, and community partners, is intended to provide an environment that will nourish student learning and support their innovative ideas. The project will use ethnographic methods to examine university change processes, identify best practices to guide institutional transformation, develop methods for co-teaching courses across units, and examine ways to reach larger audiences and sustain learning over time. The project centers on the hypothesis that a cross-college approach to transformation that focuses on expanding the practice of innovation across campus boundaries will better prepare next generation STEM innovators. The project also seeks to address the current need for rapid and profound changes in higher education, which makes conditions more favorable for institutional transformation. The data collected through this project will help provide a better understanding of the enablers and obstacles for different academic units to jointly develop new undergraduate educational models. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.