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

本工程教育研究项目旨在通过研究奥林工程学院到圣路易斯奥比斯波加州州立理工大学成功的工程课程的转移问题，了解教育创新在机构间传播的障碍。将使用现有的教育、组织和社会变革文献中的模型来探索迁移的挑战。该项目的两个目标是开发一种方法来描述工程教育工作者在传播课程进步方面所面临的挑战，并衡量一个机构对学生学习的进步是否会转移到合作学校。这个项目更广泛的意义和重要性在于探讨为什么多年来成功的课程、教学法和教育模式的反复示范没有在整个教育系统中广泛传播。转移的课程将工程内容与定义和构建工程问题的社会和历史背景联系起来，这种模式可能有助于在工程领域招募和留住女性。除了解决转移的障碍之外，课程内容还涉及修改工程教育以更好地解决最近国家小组所呼吁的复杂全球问题的新兴愿景。

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.