The culture of engineering education encompasses not only the structure of an engineering curriculum and how students and faculty members interact with it, but also the processes through which engineering curricula grow and improve. Therefore, the FC has undertaken a qualitative research project that examines processes through which coalition partners have initiated and attempted to sustain curricular change. It is important to emphasize that the focus of the study is the process of curricular change is the process of curricular change, non content of new of curricula. The project is organized as a series of qualitative case studies that examine curricular change at each of the partner institutions. Data for each case study is collected through interviews of approximately twenty-five key faculty and administrators, as well as review of relevant documents. Each case study identifies critical events and salient issues involved in that process, as well as valuable lessons learned by each institution from experience.

To date, several themes have emerged from analysis of the data.

• Each of the institutions initiated curricular improvement by developing a pilot program and offering it to a relatively small number of students. Initiating improvement via pilot programs is a well-accepted developmental strategy for engineering artificial systems. While offering some obvious evaluation benefits, it presents challenges in an educational environment. Expanding from a pilot program to a curriculum for an entire student body presents major challenges to faculty development, facility and technology costs, and management systems. Pilots should be planned both to study the proposed improvements, as well as to support eventual adoption.
• Building support for curricular improvement within and beyond the college of engineering requires significantly more planning, effort, and time than anticipated by the change leaders. Building support requires insight into the processes of change.
• Soliciting support beyond the college of engineering requires interaction with faculty members and administrators. Such interaction is outside normal communication lines.
• New curricula that integrate content from disciplines inside and outside engineering as well as introducing new pedagogies and classroom technologies requires ongoing faculty preparation and training.
• Processing for implementing curricular change and sustaining those changes differ among institutions, and even within departments of a college. Planning for how changes will be adopted needs to be part of the early development process.

To date the project has prepared four case reports that describe the process of curricular change on partner institution campuses. Data from the four case reports have been used to prepare short case studies that can be used in workshops on curricular change across the Foundation Coalition. Two workshops based on the case studies have been offered. The first was offered at the 2001 Implementing Curricular Change in Engineering Education (ICCEE) Conference that was held at Union College in Schenectady, New York, on 19-20 October 2001. The second was offered at the Share the Future III Conference.

Five more case reports are being prepared and will be finished by 30 September 2002.

Foundation Coalition Contacts

DR. JEFF FROYD
Director, Foundation Coalition
Texas A&M University
204 Zachry Engineering Center, MS 3127
College Station TX 77843-3127
Email: froyd@tamu.edu
Tel: 979.845.7574 Fax: 979.862.1940

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
nor the most intelligent,
but the one most responsive to change."

Charles Darwin .