Today's engineering education environment differs vastly from that of seven years ago. Motivated by a desire to improve student recruitment, performance, and graduation rates, as well as by external influences such as ABET 2000, more institutions are ready to make fundamental changes in their programs. As these institutions explore the research on engineering education (much of which is directly attributable to the Coalitions Program), they quickly conclude that the pedagogical theories that the FC advocates—integrated programs, active and cooperative learning, technology-enabled learning, and continuous improvement through assessment and evaluation—can address all these issues in a very positive way. So the question becomes not whether these pedagogical approaches improve the learning environment but rather what is practical and affordable.

Institutions considering alternative curriculum models can use FC partner institutions as tremendous resources. From the early years of the FC, when pilot curricula were first implemented, to today's institutionalized curricula, partners have developed, implemented, assessed, and evaluated dozens of different models of integrated courses in engineering, as illustrated in the accompanying diagram. Over 250 faculty have been engaged in these efforts and have utilized active and collaborative learning, technology-enabled instruction, and curricular assessment of student outcomes. Faculty can not only provide syllabi and exam questions for different curriculum models, they can also articulate strengths and weaknesses of the various models and the degree of alignment with the numerous system factors at their institution. Concluding there are seven models, the final institutionalized programs at our original partner campuses, to learn from is missing the best part of the story.

One of the major reasons the FC chose to move into our second five years of funding with two new partners (the University of Wisconsin and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth) was to demonstrate that our reforms could be adopted and adapted faster and cheaper by institutions willing to learn from the FC. These two campuses considered all FC models, even those that were not adopted on our campuses.

For the freshman year, UMD chose to pilot a highly integrated model for one year and, after considering the assessment data, has this year institutionalized that model. They are now in the process of piloting the sophomore year. UW chose to pilot a model more like the institutionalized TAMU version, with strong links across different cohort groups. They have doubled the size of the pilot this year and will institutionalize after one additional year of modification. These institutions understood that constraints, timing, or politics might influence the final form of a curriculum. They considered why some models, even those with very high results in student performance, were not adopted and why others were. This information was as valuable to them in making their change decisions as detailed information about course syllabi and classroom design. What they can now offer to the engineering education community is the perspective of a phase II prototype: why they made the decisions they did and how they were able to capitalize on the experiences of FC institutions.