A new year, a new semester. Happy New Year. January 19, 2009
Posted by Arun in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Well, I have made a promise to myself that I will write at least 200 words every day, and what better place to do this than on my blog! And what better to write about than my teaching and some of my thinking about my teaching.I know, I know, what you’re thinking…but, hey, with my new 24-inch monitor comin’ in next week, I can’t wait to make use of all the extra desktop space I will get – funny, how we always look for some external motivator to keep us from becoming lazy! So, laziness is why I have not updated this blog in a while. I have still continued to think about teaching engineering in the time that I have not spent time writing about my thinking.
Well…we start school tomorrow. I am coordinating the IE capstone design in the afternoon, and teaching a graduate course in advanced work design in the evening. I have about 20 students in each class.
Seniors have been working on their design projects from this past December – gives them a bit of time during the holidays to find a good design project, and define a good problem to work on during the semester. We are changing some of the report formats this semesterto emphasize technical writing. I think our students are getting really good at making technical presentations – they embed videos, and are real creative in how they frame the problem and define their solutions. Where they need to do more I think is in the report writing part, which we have decided to emphasize this semester. There is also some heartache about teaming! Has been for a while! We use the model where instructors form teams of 2 or 3 students every semester; let’s see how things go this semester.
The graduate course is something I also enjoy teaching. I have completely redesigned the format of the course to minimize my lecturing and maximize discussions and asking questions in class. All topics in the work design course are structured around important topics in work design and for each topic I have generated 5 questions that students prepare answers for; then, we discuss the 5 questions in class and I give my perspective on the questions. There is no right answer to the questions, and that makes this class very exciting and dynamic for me. I learn from this class every time. Students are all full-time working engineers in industry, so they bring so much practice perspectives into the discussion. I bring theoretical perspectives to the class, and we get such a great blend of theory and practice in this class.
I know…its been some time… June 18, 2008
Posted by Arun in Our Life.2 comments
I know…its been about a couple of months since I posted. End of semester rush (the month of May always seems to move at breakneck speed for me somehow). Then, I went to Vancouver for the annual Industrial Engineering Research Conference. Vancouver was a lot of fun. I took a cable car to Grouse Mountain and watched a Lumberjack show! That was a lot of fun for me.
I am back now after a short break from blogging. Summer is writing time for a lot of us professors. We write research papers, grant proposals for more money, and blogs like this one. I also love traveling in summer. I’ll tell you about my upcoming travel in my next post.
MIA – Man In Action April 19, 2008
Posted by louiseverett in Uncategorized.add a comment
I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. I’ve always thought myself up to date but …
Who reads this stuff anyway?
okay so now that Arun has demonstrated to everyone that I am too inefficient to actually get my work done, I’m not sure what to say.
I assume one of the things this blog is about is issues involved in teaching engineering. So here we go, comment on this:
I believe engineering teaches a lot of how to do a lot of little things: how to get the efficiency of a rankine cycle, how to draw a freebody diagram, how to … What we seem to be missing are the big things. How do you find a new idea? How do you know whether or not you can put a satellite into orbit? How do you know the little green men on Mars really are friendly? Okay maybe the last one is silly… everyone knows the men on Mars are purple.
Anyway, licensing exams require graduates to be able to do these little things but to really make progress you need to do the big things. So… what should we be teaching? is it easier to do big things once you know how to do the little ones? or is it easier to do the little things once you know the big ones? (Who can tell me what the big things are?)
Anyway…. there Arun … Ha! I posted.
My co-author is MIA March 12, 2008
Posted by Arun in Our Life.add a comment
In case you are wondering, my co-author Louis Everett is MIA. He has promised to begin blogging soon, though. He is just very busy with some of his administrative responsibilities as chairman of the mechanical engineering department here at UTEP.
For our students reading this, oh yes, we engineering faculty do “other” things outside the classroom. Louis Everett, for example, is the chair of the ME department – this is a lot of hard work for him; to put it mildly, the buck stops with him as the chair of the department. I, for example, am the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Industrial Engineering, which is an international research journal in industrial engineering with worldwide circulation. Professors from all over the world attempt to publish their research in this journal through a peer-reviewed process. It is hard work managing the journal.
Engineering faculty also write blogs like this, write research proposals and attempt to win grant money for researching interesting engineering problems, serve as consultants for solving real world engineering problems, travel to conferences to present their research work (only if the conference is in a really nice place like Hawaii or Puerto Rico), work on developing and keeping standards on curriculum, develop new courses to benefit you, supervise undergraduate students and graduate students in research and learning, run research laboratories, perform service to the department by being advisors, serve UTEP and the community we live in through their activities as professors, and, have their families that they spend their time with (although our families would have trouble agreeing with this one).
I bet many of you did not realize that your engineering professors do all of the above and more with the 24 hours they have. Of course, you are why we do what we do.
If you want to know more about any of the above things I do, come talk to me, and I’ll be more than glad to share some neat stories with you. Or talk to Louis Everett. If you can find him. He is MIA.
Authentic Discourse for the 2020 Engineer March 10, 2008
Posted by Arun in Future Engineer, Teaching Practice.add a comment
This is my second post on the 2020 Engineer theme and certainly won’t be the last one, I don’t think! 2020…that’s about 12 years from now! Isn’t 12 years a pretty long planning horizon to plan for? I wonder why the National Academy of Engineering report that I blogged about in a previous post picked 2020 to plan for. 20 years into the 21st century!
Well, in any case, I mentioned in my previous post about the 2020 engineer that I was part of a NSF CCLI Phase 2 project on cultivating authentic discourse for the 2020 engineer. I thought I would write a little about this project.
My co-author of this blog, Louis Everett, had a National Science Foundation CCLI Phase 1 project on using multiple intelligences to teach dynamics. Based on results from that first grant, we got together with colleagues Violet Jones, Kerrie Kephart and Elsa Villa from the College of Education here at UTEP and wrote a Phase 2 proposal to NSF. And NSF gave us half a million dollars (although I’ve never seen anything larger than a 20 dollar bill in my life so far) to research how we can cultivate authentic engineering discourse for the 2020 engineer.
We use counterintuitive problems to systematically try and uncover student misconceptions in engineering concepts. Designing these counterintuitive activities are not trivial – it is difficult even for faculty (who have PhDs). Our colleagues from College of Education observe what we do and what happens in the classroom to see if learning occurs. Faculty think about their thinking (like what I am doing in this blog), so faculty learn too. We have several faculty from UTEP, and faculty from NMSU, Baylor, UT Panam, and Prairie View A & M already trying these methods in their classes.
If you are a faculty and would like to be part of our project or try some of our methods, send me an email at apennathur@utep.edu. You can also read about our project at http://2020engineer.iss.utep.edu/world.
We lecture and discuss – a lot! March 9, 2008
Posted by Arun in Teaching Practice.Tags: Discussion, Engineering Teaching Methods, Lectures
add a comment
I was reading the 2008 Science and Engineering Indicators from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and found that a large percentage (83%) of instructional faculty use lectures and discussion as the primary instructional method in undergraduate classes. Here are some other interesting tidbits about higher education faculty from the report:
- More than half of natural sciences and engineering faculty require their undergraduate students to participate in group projects (compared with 48% of social and behavioral sciences faculty), and more than 60% require lab assignments (compared with 24% of social and behavioral sciences faculty).
- The use of term papers increased in all disciplines between 1992 and 2003. Social and behavioral sciences faculty are more likely than faculty in other S&E fields to require written work of their students: 85% of social and behavioral sciences faculty require term papers of their undergraduate students compared with 76% of agricultural/biological/health sciences faculty and 57% of physical/mathematics/computer sciences/engineering faculty.
You can read the full report at: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/toc.htm.
I lecture, discuss (a lot thanks to an NSF CCLI Phase 2 grant I am part of on metacognition and discourse in engineering), and use projects. I don’t think I have my undergraduate students write enough, though.
The 2020 Engineer March 7, 2008
Posted by Arun in Future Engineer.Tags: 2020 Engineer, Creativity, Engineering Education
1 comment so far
In 2004, the National Academy of Engineering published a report “The Engineer of the 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century.” You can read the full report online from the National Academy of Engineering webpage (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10999).Here are the attributes of the 2020 engineer identified in that report:
1. strong analytical skills
2. practical ingenuity
3. creativity
4. communication
5. mastery of principles of business and management
6. leadership
7. high ethical standards and professionalism
8. dynamism, agility, resilience and flexibility
9. lifelong learning
Practical ingenuity, creativity, leadership, and dynamism, agility, resilience and flexibility strike me as attributes that we don’t systematically think about cultivating in our engineering classes. It seems to me that in addition to valuing the usual attributes such as analytical skills, communication in oral and written form, etc., in our students (everything we do for ABET), we have to think about systematically creating value (in how we evaluate student performance perhaps) for demonstration of practical ingenuity, creativity and leadership.
