Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century

SHAPING OUR WORLD

SHAPING OUR WORLD Engineering Education for the 21st Century Edited by GRÉTAR TRYGGVASON DIRAN APELIAN

The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society

Copyright Ó 2012 by The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey. Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tryggvason, Gretar. Shaping our world : engineering education for the 21st century / Gretar Tryggvason, Diran Apelian. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-470-92974-2 (pbk.) 1. Engineering–Study and teaching. I. Apelian, Diran. II. Title. T65.T76 2012 607.1–dc23 2011028224

The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society

oBook ISBN: 9781118138267 ePDF ISBN: 9781118138236 ePub ISBN: 9781118138243 eMobi ISBN: 9781118138250 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS FOREWORD

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Charles M. Vest

PREFACE

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CONTRIBUTORS

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PART I THE NEED AND CONTEXT 1. MEETING NEW CHALLENGES: TRANSFORMING ENGINEERING EDUCATION

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Grétar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian

2. ONE WORLD: PREPARING ENGINEERS FOR THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

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Michael J. Dolan

3. ENGINEERS: LEADERS, INNOVATORS, AND BUILDERS

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Diran Apelian

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CONTENTS

4. HOLISTIC EDUCATION: LEARNING AND DOING IN CONTEXT

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Dennis D. Berkey

PART II

EFFECTIVE PRACTICES

5. IGNITION: THE GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS

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Arthur C. Heinricher and Kristin Wobbe

6. GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP: STUDENTS SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS AROUND THE WORLD

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Richard F. Vaz, Natalie A. Mello, and David DiBiasio

7. FOSTERING CITIZENSHIP AND ADVOCACY THROUGH THE HUMANITIES AND ARTS

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Svetlana Nikitina and David Spanagel

8. THE CAPSTONE PROJECT: AN INTEGRATED EXPERIENCE

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Fred J. Looft and Yiming (Kevin) Rong

9. TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN THE INNOVATION ECONOMY

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Curtis R. Carlson and Jerome J. Schaufeld

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A NEW DISCIPLINE FOR A NEW CENTURY: ROBOTICS ENGINEERING

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Michael A. Gennert, Fred J. Looft, and Grétar Tryggvason

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GRADUATE EDUCATION FOR THE PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER

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Richard D. Sisson and Nikolaos A. Gatsonis

12.

HOLISTIC GRADUATE EDUCATION: FIRE PROTECTION ENGINEERING Kathy A. Notarianni

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CONTENTS

PART III 13.

OUTCOMES AND IMPLICATIONS

FORTY YEARS OF OUTCOMES-BASED PROJECT CENTRIC EDUCATION: LESSONS LEARNED

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241 243

John Orr

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SO MUCH ACCOMPLISHED: SO MUCH TO BE DONE

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Eli Fromm

BIOSKETCHES

283

FOREWORD CHARLES M. VEST

This book is in large measure a memoir. It is the memoir of an institution, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Why would anyone want to read an institutional memoir, and why would an institutional memoir have a forwardoriented subtitle like Engineering Education for the 21stCentury? The answers will become apparent as the reader delves into this book. It should be read because it holds remarkably clear lessons and guidance for the future of engineering education. For the most part, it presents an in-depth view of the 40-year history of the WPI Plan. You may ask, “History?” Well, yes, but it is an intriguing Back to the Future kind of history, because in the 1970s WPI started down a path that many US engineering schools are just now attempting to define, build, and travel down today in the dawning years of this new century. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of social unrest, pervasive angst about our nation’s actions in Viet Nam, questioning of basic principles of all sorts, and rebellion against structure, including structure in higher education. Some institutions were badly damaged during these years by introducing ill-thought-out “reforms” that simply lowered standards, threw away any semblance of respect for intellectual discipline, endlessly fragmented knowledge, and brought political ideology to curricular areas where it did not belong. Other institutions in fact were substantially strengthened through bold actions planned through serious introspection and openmindedness. WPI presents a wonderful example of such strengthening through the establishment of the WPI Plan, a more-or-less radical, and certainly bold, new pathway through undergraduate engineering education. It was project-oriented, imparted to students early on an understanding of what engineers actually do, connected them in an experiential manner with the wider world, emphasized competencies in basic science and engineering techniques, and continually reminded them that engineers are absolutely

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FOREWORD

essential to meet most great human challenges, but that they cannot do so alone. All of this was, of course, prescient. Let me fast forward to today, the early years of the twenty-first century. What are engineering educators worrying about, and what is the new context in which their students, as engineers, will live and work? They are worrying about how to make their students understand early on the excitement and relevance of the engineering profession. They are worrying about how to address the reality and opportunity of globalization as literally hundreds of millions of people are rather suddenly becoming better educated, technically oriented, and businesses and processes are spread around the globe. They are worrying about how best to utilize the enormous computing power and instant communication through a vast and pervasive network that integrates us all together. They are worrying about how to attract more bright and creative students and prepare them to build economies and provide employment through innovation and entrepreneurship. And they are worrying about how best to immerse engineering students in an environment and expectations that will directly relate them to the great challenges of our times, feeding a world population approaching nine billion people; providing clean, affordable, and sustainable energy; delivering health care, and, more importantly, delivering health to the world’s neediest; and facing the many other grand challenges associated with the expanding human understanding, power, and impact on our planet. Now the Back to the Future nature of this book becomes apparent. The questions and challenges of engineering education in 2011 are congruent with the goals and nature of the WPI Plan as it was formulated 40 years ago. There are many lessons for us to learn, and they are laid out directly and well in this book. To see the congruence, we need look no farther than the subjects of WPI’s Great Problems Seminars that engage first-year students and are team taught by engineering professors and professors from other fields that would be needed to solve complex techno-social problems: . . . .

Feed the World Power the World Heal the World Grand Challenges

Well, OK, these specific topics were not introduced until 2007, but the point is that the educational style imbedded in the plan permits such introductions and the flexibility to adjust to a changing world. And this is a wonderful way to introduce students at the very beginning of their studies to what engineers do

FOREWORD

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and why it matters. Inspiration, motivation, and empowerment are built into the freshman year. From the beginning, the WPI curriculum included three Qualifying Projects: .

. .

The Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP) that engaged small student teams in addressing complicated, broad-based problems of societal importance, many carried out in other countries; The Major Qualifying Project (MQP) that is, in essence, a team-based capstone project; and The Sufficiency Project that demonstrates mastery of subject matter from the humanities and arts.

Today, WPI has established a Global Perspective Program (GPP) that enables 50% of its students to spend time in another country in intense project-based, experiential service learning—an admirable, indeed enviable accomplishment. These brief glimpses of the WPI Plan, its goals, and relevance to the future of engineering education raise a fundamental question, “Does it work?” That question undoubtedly was on the minds of the 33% of the WPI Faculty who voted against its adoption in 1970, and it should be on the mind of any educator interested in adapting this outcomes-based and project-centered educational program wholly or in part today. Fortunately, a good bit of assessment has been conducted throughout the plan’s history, and the assessment is summarized in this book. Although this volume is predominantly authored by WPI faculty members, including its president, additional authors have been included both to bring external and contextual perspectives, for example, Curtis Carlson, CEO of SRI International. Engineering Education visionary Eli Fromm also contributes a chapter. Throughout Shaping Our World, the authors have painstakingly related their work and thinking to a vast array of the contemporary literature of goals and means of engineering education. Hence, this book implicitly serves as a useful guide to this literature. Although I deemed this an institutional memoir, it is one that has a beginning, but no end in sight. The WPI Faculty has properly made the WPI Plan a living, adapting system with a constant philosophy of hands-on, project-based learning that signals relevance, builds student responsibility, and inspires and empowers them to use their technological skills to contribute to society.

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I am grateful that editors Gretar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian have delivered this volume to provide guidance and lessons learned to engineering educators. There is much to be learned here, and much inspiration for change to be garnered. CHARLES M. VEST President US National Academy of Engineering

PREFACE

In the past two decades we have seen a plethora of studies, reports, and books that articulate the shortcomings of engineering education and what is lacking in the curriculum. These studies and reports have reminded us that the engineering curriculum has not changed much in the past few decades, while the world has changed dramatically. However, many of these studies have focused on identifying the problem and articulating the general needs, rather than outlining specific proposals on how to educate the engineer of the twentyfirst century. Both of us came to WPI from other universities; Apelian in 1990 from Drexel University, and Tryggvason in 2000 from the University of Michigan. Both of us oversees fairly large research groups and have a long track of scholarly accomplishments. We are also ardent students of engineering education and have been involved with various educational initiatives over the last two to three decades. At WPI, we found an educational program that does exactly what all the various studies have been calling for; namely, student outcomes that capture the attributes of the “Engineer 2020.” These undergraduate learning outcomes are as follows: . . .

Have a base of knowledge in mathematics, science, and humanistic studies. Have mastered fundamental concepts and methods in their principal areas of study. Understand and employ current technological tools. xiii

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Be effective in oral, written, and visual communication. Function effectively both individually and on teams. Be able to identify, analyze, and solve problems creatively through sustained critical investigation. Be able to make connections between disciplines and to integrate information from multiple sources. Be aware of how their decisions affect and are affected by other individuals separated by time, space, and culture. Be aware of personal, societal, and professional ethical standards. Have the skills, diligence, and commitment to excellence needed to engage in lifelong learning.

The paradox we were faced with is that the engineering community has been calling out what is needed, and yet at WPI, an educational paradigm was established in 1970 to do exactly what is being called for. This paradox was the genesis of this book. We decided to document and to write a user’s manual that describes how to do it, if you will, rather than writing as to what is needed and what is the problem. The title Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21stCentury represents our view and belief that through a holistic education we will ensure the development of the next generation of successful leaders and engineers. This is not a new suggestion: when the E´cole Polytechnique was founded in France during the French Revolution (1794), mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace stated that the E´cole Polytechnique should aim to produce young people “destined to form the elite of the nation and to occupy high posts in the state.” What is being followed today at WPI is true to our middle name of “Polytechnic,” similar to what the founders of the very first Polytechnique had in mind. The book is organized in three distinct sections: (i) The Need and Context; (ii) Effective Practices; and (iii) Outcomes and Implications. Four chapters provide the context, followed by eight chapters that describe effective practices throughout the undergraduate and graduate programs. Specific attention is given to project-based learning methods to ensure that the above-cited learning outcomes can be met. Lastly, two chapters address 40 years of outcomes and the path ahead. We are fortunate and privileged to have had a distinguished group of authors contributing to this book. In addition to our cherished faculty colleagues who contributed and assisted us, we are indebted to President Dennis Berkey of WPI for his support and encouragement. We also want to acknowledge: Michael Dolan, Sr. Vice President of Exxon Mobil Corporation for his chapter on preparing engineers for the Global Economy; Dr. Curt Carlson, President and CEO of SRI International for his contributions on the Innovation

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Economy; Prof. Eli Fromm of Drexel University, Roy Brothers University Professor and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Eli is the inaugural recipient (2002) of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering for his significant contributions to engineering and technology education. He authored our closing chapter titled “So Much Accomplished: So Much to Be Done.” A biosketch on each author is given at the end of this book. We are grateful that we had such a cadre of remarkable contributing authors. In closing, we want to give special thanks to Laura Hanlan of WPI’s Gordon Library. She and her colleagues Lynne Riley, Joanne Beller, and Robin Benoit assisted us with the references and citations. We appreciate Michael Dorsey’s help in obtaining photos from our university archives. We also want to acknowledge the support and guidance of Anita Lekhwani of Wiley-Blackwell for her steadfast support. Lastly, we salute Dean Emeritus William Grogan, and the pioneering faculty of 1970 who were not content with the status quo, envisioned a future, and made it happen. DIRAN APELIAN GRE´TAR TRYGGVASON

CONTRIBUTORS DIRAN APELIAN, Howmet Professor of Engineering, Director, Metal Processing Institute, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA DENNIS D. BERKEY, President and CEO, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA CURTIS R. CARLSON, President and CEO, SRI International, Menlo Park, California, USA DAVID DIBIASIO, Department Head and Associate Professor, Chemical Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA MICHAEL J. DOLAN, Senior Vice President, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Irvine, Texas, USA ELI FROMM, Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA NIKOLAOS A. GATSONIS, Professor, Mechanical Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA MICHAEL A. GENNERT, Department Head, Computer Science, Director, Robotics Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA ARTHUR C. HEINRICHER, Dean of Undergraduate Studies, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

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CONTRIBUTORS

FRED J. LOOFT, Department Head and Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA NATALIE A. MELLO, Director, Global Operations, Interdisciplinary & Global Studies, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA SVETLANA NIKITINA, Assistant Professor, English, Department, Humanities & Arts, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA KATHY A. NOTARIANNI, Department Head and Associate Professor, Fire Protection Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA JOHN A. ORR, Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA YIMING (KEVIN) RONG, Professor, Mechanical Engineering, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA JEROME SCHAUFELD, Professor, Entrepreneurship, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA RICHARD D. SISSON, Jr., Professor and Dean of Graduate Studies, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA DAVID SPANAGEL, Assistant Professor, History, Humanities and Arts, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA  GRETAR TRYGGVASON, Professor, Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, USA

RICHARD F. VAZ, Dean of Interdisciplinary & Global Studies, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA KRISTIN WOBBE, Department Head, Chemistry & Biochemistry, Associate Dean, First Year Experience, WPI, Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

PART I

THE NEED AND CONTEXT

CHAPTER 1

MEETING NEW CHALLENGES: TRANSFORMING ENGINEERING EDUCATION GRÉTAR TRYGGVASON and DIRAN APELIAN

1.1 INTRODUCTION Engineering education is embarking on a transformation as profound as the birth of engineering as a profession in the nineteenth century and the establishment of scientific knowledge as the foundations of engineering in the middle of the twentieth century. The change is driven by the emergence of a connected, competitive, and entrepreneurial global economy, where successful engineers will need a technical competency and a professional skill set that differs from what worked in the past. Technology has made globalization possible and globalization, in turn, is affecting technology in profound and often unexpected ways. While globalization has increased prosperity and opened new and larger markets, globalization and Internet connectivity has also made available labor, that is often both educated and cheap. It is impossible to predict the long-term impact of these changes on the socioeconomic structure of developed and developing countries, but what is clear is that the prosperity of nations is intrinsically linked to a population with the knowledge and know-how to develop and produce goods and services that are competitive [1,2]. The education of innovative and entrepreneurial engineers is therefore of critical importance to every nation. The modern professional identity of engineers emerged in the early nineteenth century with the establishment of the Ecole Polytechnique in France and the foundation of professional engineering societies in England. The current way of educating engineers was already established by the early Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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twentieth century, but the content has, of course, changed significantly since then. The last major shift in engineering education in the United States goes back over half a century when the role of science in the educational program increased significantly [3]. Although some evolution certainly has taken place, those changes are relatively modest and the basic structure and course content of a modern engineering program is very familiar to someone educated in the 1960s. The time for another major reexamination of engineering education is overdue. Countless committees, taskforces, panels, and commissions have already addressed the need and eloquently emphasized that the competitiveness of the country and therefore our standard of living hinges on our ability to educate a large number of sufficiently innovative engineers [4–8, for example]. That the world has changed in fundamental ways during the past few decades is self-evident. Computers have fundamentally altered the way we live and work. They have, in particular, transformed our ability to deal with information and data. We are now moving rapidly toward a world where—for all practical purposes—we can process information infinitely fast, store infinite amount of data, and transmit data instantaneously, to paraphrase a statement made by Henry B. Schacht, the first chairman and CEO of Lucent Technologies Inc. in his commencement speech at WPI in 2001. As a result of the emergence of the Internet, knowledge has been “communalized.” Everybody has access to information about anything and—perhaps equally importantly—knowledge is no longer “owned” by the experts. High-school students can—and do—write articles on Wikipedia, just like the professors. This change has already transformed industries and raised fundamental questions about authorship and ownership of information and scholarly works. Computers have also empowered the average man and woman to create products that previously required large corporations with significant resources. In many aspects of digital media we have now reached the point that if we can imagine it, we can create it. As computer speed and software advances, this trend will continue and in next 20 years or so it is very likely—certain, actually—that a high-school student with a little bit of time will have the capability to create his or her full-length animated movie with virtual actors of the quality currently only produced by major movie makers. The same transformation is likely to happen to the creation of engineered artifacts, although the time frame may be somewhat longer: If you can imagine it, you can create it! Ordering components through the web and receiving them in the mail is now part of everyday life and e-manufacturing—where the customer sends an electronic description of a part to a manufacture who makes it and mails it back—is emerging [9]. While low cost manufacturing is currently made possible by outsourcing it to countries with low labor cost, cheap and flexible robotics is likely to be equally or more important in the future.

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The movement of labor intensive but low-skill industries to countries with low labor costs is, of course, not new. Such transfer has been largely responsible for the low cost and abundance of most manufactured goods and the rising importance of service over “stuff.” Today, however, the rise in education in nations where salaries are low and the connectivity that makes this cheap and educated talent available worldwide are gradually changing the nature of jobs that move oversees. Skill is rapidly becoming a commodity that can be bought from low-cost providers anywhere. It does not matter what you know how to do, someone else knows it too and is willing to do it for less. Thus, highly educated workers are no longer immune from the possible outsourcing of their job. The mechanization of labor and advances in transportation, taking place during the past century, coupled with the more recent information revolution and globalization of the economy, has brought us unprecedented opportunities and challenges. On the positive side is that the increase in our material wealth makes it—for the first time in history—realistic to talk about eliminating extreme poverty [10,11]. On the negative side is the possibility—for the first time in history—that human consumption of materials and energy may irreversibly damage the entire global environment [12,13]. Just as engineering brought us to where we are, engineering will be central to shaping the world of the future. Doing so will be both a daunting and an exciting undertaking! 1.2 WHAT IS ENGINEERING? A discussion of the future of engineering education is impossible without an attempt to define engineering. Such definitions are in abundance: “engineers solve problems,” “engineering is applied science,” “engineering is the use of science and mathematics to solve technical problems.” These definitions are about as accurate as describing Columbus as a sailor—true but vastly incomplete. Engineering is perhaps best understood in its relation to other disciplines. In Figure 1.1, we project several disciplines onto a plane defined by the physical versus the cultural world as one axis and study versus create on the other. The sciences obviously involve studying the physical world and humanities study the cultural world. Engineering falls squarely in the lower right quadrant (as does architecture, for example), thus sitting next to the sciences (studying the physical world) and the arts (creating the cultural world). Thus, engineering is properly described as the discipline focused on the creation of our physical world. Some professions, such as law and medicine, do not fit particularly well in this particular projection, pointing out important differences with engineering. Engineering is, of course, a profession. However, the fact that it fits naturally in the projection in Figure 1.1

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FIGURE 1.1 Projection of different disciplines onto a plane defined by cultural versus physical and study versus create. Engineering is the discipline focused on creating our physical world.

emphasizes an important distinction from many other professions—namely that engineering is also a discipline with well-defined intellectual foundations comparable but distinct from the sciences, arts, and the humanities. This difference is clear if one examines the roots of engineering and its evolution (see [14], for example). The importance of recognizing the discipline of engineering as distinct from the engineering profession has recently been emphasized by Duderstadt [15]. Engineering in the United States owes much to both French and British traditions. Louis XV established a civilian engineering corps to oversee the design and construction of bridges and roads in France. In 1716 he established the Corps des Ponts et Chausse´es, which subsequently established a school to train its members; in 1747 Ecole des Ponts et Chausse´es was founded in Paris—the very first engineering school ever. This led to the founding of other technical schools in France, the Grandes Ecoles. The famous Ecole Polytechnique of Paris was founded in 1794 by Napoleon. The French recognized engineering as a noble profession that prepared the future statesmen and leaders of their society. Laplace, who served as the head of a commission to reorganize the Ecole Polytechnique, wrote that the Ecole’s goal is to produce young people “Destined to form the elite of the nation and to occupy high posts in the State.” The graduates of these Grandes Ecoles have over the years proven their “power” by occupying posts in the highest economic strata of French society [16]. Engineering in Britain evolved along a very different path. The English upper class believed in a much more classical education wherein the bright young males sought careers in the church or in the army. There was no meaningful governmental funding of higher technical education

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during the industrial revolution and it was not until the early 1900s that Cambridge and Oxford Universities established chairs in Engineering Science. Much of the industrial revolution was driven by individual ingenuity and entrepreneurial initiative. Knowledge was gained pragmatically in workshops and on constructions sites. Apprenticeships became the way young men went into engineering. As Samuel Florman has characterized it—“In France engineering became associated with professional pride and public esteem, with leadership at the highest level. Whereas, in Britain, engineering was considered a navvy occupation—the original navvies being the laborers on canal construction jobs” [17]. Both of these cultures, the theoretical foundation emphasized by the French Ecoles and the practical hands-on attitude of the British, permeated across the Atlantic and impacted the development of engineering education in America. Although it is possible to argue that the marriage of theory and practice played no small part in the phenomenal successes of American engineering in the twentieth century, finding the right mix challenged engineering educators throughout the century. As engineering education has changed in the past to adjust to the needs of society, the evolution must continue and change is needed to address the needs of the twenty-first century. With many approximations and generous error bars, we can summarize major trends in engineering education by the following classification (for a more fine-grained classification see Ref. [18]): Nineteenth Century and First Half of the Twentieth Century: The Professional Engineer. As engineering became a distinct profession, early engineering programs focused on providing their graduates with considerable hands-on training. However, the role of science and mathematical modeling slowly increased and gained acceptance. Second Half of the Twentieth Century: The Scientific Engineer. By midcentury, technological complexities required engineers to be well versed in science and mathematics and the engineering curriculum adjusted to the changed needs. This structure has, to a large degree, continued until the present time, although “design” content increased slowly. In the early 1990s, it was clear that more than science was needed and many schools started to emphasize nontechnical professional skills such as teamwork and communications. The twenty-first Century: The Entrepreneurial/Enterprising Engineer. The rapid changes that the world is currently going through, as discussed above, coupled with changes in engineering education starting to take place in the 1990s, will result in an extensive reengineering of engineering education. While the new structure will, almost certainly,

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continue to be based on a solid preparation in mathematics and sciences, it is likely to emphasize the professional role of the engineer, and then demand new qualifications suited for the new world order. These changes were driven by needs. The professionalization of engineering coincided with an explosion in the creation of new infrastructure and mechanization and the need for people with the appropriate skills to design and oversee such projects. Similarly, the “scientifization” of engineering was a response to the realization that during the twentieth century, barriers to new engineering achievement were primarily our understanding of physical phenomenon. We could not build fast airplanes without understanding aerodynamics, we could not harness nuclear energy without understanding atomic physics, integrated circuits required understanding of solid-state physics, and so on. Engineers met the challenge learning what they needed to learn. There was a lot to learn and the learning consumed the profession for several decades. Indeed, for a while many engineers—academics in particular—became so enamored by what they were learning that they lost sight of why they were learning it. The distinction between engineering and science became blurred. The general public became confused too and could not distinguish the engineer from the scientist. A “rocket scientist” is, after all, usually an aerospace engineer! Engineering and science, however, make for a somewhat “strange bedfellows” in the words of E.E. Lewis [14]—a point reiterated by B.M. Gordon in his observation that the acronym STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) lumps together very distinct topics [19]. The difference, as von Karman famously said, is that “scientists discover what is, engineers create what has not been.” This observation is seconded in Figure 1.1. 1.3 THE ENGINEER OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Engineering students and their teachers are already scrambling to adjust to a world where all information is immediately available and tools to analyze and create new artifacts are in abundance. However, as skill becomes a commodity and routine engineering services are available from low-cost providers that can be located anywhere in the world, engineering education has to add value beyond just teaching skills. It seems reasonably safe to expect that the added value will include an extensive exposure to innovation and entrepreneurship [4–8], which in turn requires students to become superb communicators and to understand the context of their work. In Ref. [20] we suggested that the entrepreneurial engineer of the twenty-first century is someone who:

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knows everything: can find information about anything quickly and knows how to evaluate and use the information. The entrepreneurial engineer has the ability to transform information into knowledge. can do anything: understands the engineering basics to the degree that he or she can quickly assess what needs to be done, can acquire the tools needed, and can use these tools proficiently. collaborates: has the communication skills, team skills, and understanding of global and current issues necessary to work effectively with anybody, anywhere. innovates: has the imagination, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the managerial skills to identify needs, come up with new solutions, and take it into the world. In some cases we are already making progress toward these attributes but in other cases we have a long way to go. The Internet has transformed our access to information in a way that is more like the invention of writing than the introduction of the printed book. Enormous amount of information is already available within a few clicks and everything ever written (and anything else that can be digitized) will be accessible within a few decades at most— probably not free, but certainly under a cost structure that will not impede access. We can now “google” any concept and the probability is that we will have an abundance of information in a matter of seconds. Thus, in some sense we already “know everything”—at least if we know how to ask. As search engines become more sophisticated, knowing how to ask is likely to become easier and the probability that the information we find is relevant will increase. The transformative effect of being able to access information instantaneously cannot be overemphasized. We all “know more than we know” because in addition to knowledge we possess, we also know where to find information about specific things. Most of us know how to fix our computers, not by knowing so ourselves, but by knowing whom to ask. The introduction of the Internet expanded this network of contacts to literally every piece of information that is out there. However, while finding information is already trivial, the communalization of knowledge will make it essential for the professional engineer to be able to judge the quality of the information that he or she has. Thus, teaching how to deal with an abundance of information and how to judge the relevance and the quality of the information at hand will be the educational challenge. Traditionally, teaching engineering students how to do certain tasks took up a significant fraction of the time in the curriculum. The explosion in the availability of tools to do nearly everything does, however, suggest that engineering educators must rethink how students are prepared in the

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foundation of their disciplines. Computer programs to do virtually anything, from simple calculations to simulations of complex systems, to design a complete engineered artifact, and to create physical prototypes, empower the modern engineer to do more than his or her predecessors could ever imagine. These tools do, however, not only require the engineer to know how to use them but also require him or her to be able to first of all to assess what tool is appropriate for a given task and then to be able to evaluate the result in a critical way. Indeed, the importance of common sense will be even greater when design and analysis are done exclusively on the computer (as the saying goes: “to err is human, but to really screw up you need a computer”). While teaching engineering students how the physical world works will remain at the core of engineering education for the foreseeable future, reexamining how we teach the fundamentals of engineering science to students is needed. In addition to what we teach, how we teach is starting to change. Internet tutorials and guides are already available on many subjects and in many cases complete courses, often specifically designed for Internet delivery [21,22] are available. This trend will accelerate and the material will grow in sophistication. The National Academy of Engineering has identified “advance personalized learning,” where instructions “can be individualized based on learning styles, speeds, and interests,” as one of the Grand Engineering Challenges” of the twenty-first century; Christensen [23] has discussed the impact of computerized learning on our educational system; and many investigators are engaged in developing and improving such systems [24,25, for example]. Since engineers need to know many things and be able to do much, engineering courses generally tend to have high content density and most of the class time is spent on information transfer (this is what you need to know and here is how to compute the answer). In other disciplines the emphasis is very different. A course in the humanities, for example, typically will include considerable time spent on reflection and discussion of the material. We obviously appreciate the value of “reflections” in engineering and many instructors have attempted to incorporate more of that into their courses [26]. In most cases, however, the need to “transfer information” is so great that everything else is crowded out. Computerized and personalized learning has the power to relieve us from much of the information transfer part. The engineering student of the future is likely to learn thermodynamics, for example, interacting with a computer program that adjusts to his or her learning styles and speed, provides constant feedback and assures mastery of every step, rather than from a faculty member droning on (and on) in the front of the class. Furthermore, once the foundations has been mastered, the rest of the studying will often be on a “just-in-time” basis, as the engineering student needs specific mastery for a specific task. With much (or at least some) information transfer moved out of the classroom, the time with a faculty

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member can focus on other aspects of engineering, such as developing communication skills, an understanding of the social context of engineering and fostering innovative and entrepreneurial mindset. The professor is now a facilitator and a coach of the learning environment, and the traditional lecture format of instruction is not the modus operandi. Considerable progress has already been achieved in the United States to make communication in the broadest sense an integral part of the engineering curriculum [26,27]. Most programs now require their graduates to exhibit proficiency in oral and written communications and to be able to work on diverse teams. Engineering, possibly more than most professions, requires accurate and efficient communications—I have to understand what you are saying and vice versa for the design that we both are working on to function. Furthermore, in a world where highly networked organizations are increasingly replacing highly hierarchical ones, the ability to communication is key for professional success. The surprising thing about communications is not that engineering schools have recently started to emphasize it (motivated by ABET [27], in some cases), but that there ever was a need to remind educators that engineers need to communicate! However, in a global economy the ability to communicate takes on a much broader meaning. Not only are engineers frequently working on products that will be made in a different country and marketed to people of different cultures, but product engineering is increasingly done by teams consisting of people located in different countries and with diverse cultural background. Such interactions obviously have enormous potentials for misunderstanding and conflicts. Ron Zarella, CEO of Bausch and Lomb, said the following in a speech that he gave at WPI during a globalization workshop: We make a product called interplak. The electromechanical design for this home plaque-removal device is done in Germany and Japan. The batteries are supplied from Japan, the motors are built in the Peoples Republic of China, the charging base is made in Hong Kong, the precision molded plastic pieces are manufactured in Atlanta, GA, the brush head is made in Ohio, and the final assembly is done in Mexico.

Preparing young engineers to work in a global (or “flat” according to Ref. [28]) world is no longer something that engineering schools can treat as an extracurricular activity, available only to those who have the time and resources to spend an extra semester abroad. Every student must now develop the attitudes and skills necessary to function globally, right from the time they first enter the workforce. As important it is for the engineer to understand the physical sciences, the “show stoppers” of the new century are likely to have as much to do with

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human behavior than with the laws of Physics. We have technical solutions that allow us (at least in principle) to provide unlimited power and we could probably curb (or at least reduce significantly) greenhouse gas emission with nothing more than current technologies. The question will increasingly move from “can we” to “do we want to.” The engineer is going to have to adjust to this environment. In addition to learning how the physical world works (and that will remain as important as ever) the engineer of the new century has to understand how humans behave. Attempts to understand human behavior go back to the beginning of the species. Historians have attempted to understand us, sociologists and economists have sought to predict our behavior, marketers have attempted to sway us, and politicians and religious leaders have dreamed about controlling us. For the most part we defy simple models, but in the last few decades our understanding of ourselves has moved forward significantly. We now know scientifically that we can be exasperatingly irrational (to the dismay of economists), have a strong sense of fairness, yet can be unspeakably cruel in the “right” circumstances (the Stanford experiment), make snap decisions, and depend intimately on each other. Some of our understanding comes from progress in medical imaging—where researchers are now literally able to see what we are thinking—and from a large number of careful behavioral studies. This progress is not just manifested by a flood of pop social science books [29–31] but also by increasingly sophisticated use of this knowledge in politics [32]. The importance of understanding how humans think, make decisions, and act is already evident in product design (the iPod contained no technological breakthrough, the Segway is a technological marvel), and we now know that failure to account for human behavior is often the main reason for catastrophic accidents (airplane crashes, Chernobyl). Understanding how to create systems, structures and products that work in harmony with how humans act will be central to the engineer of the twenty-first century. For him and her, social science may well become what physics was for the engineer of the twentieth century! 1.4 THE NEXT FEW YEARS AND THE WPI EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM Although the details of engineering programs of the future are difficult to predict (and they may look very different from each other), the following developments seem relatively safe bets: .

Development of competencies (knowing everything and being able to do everything) will increasingly take place outside the classroom through personalized computer-based learning, with time with faculty members

THE NEXT FEW YEARS AND THE WPI EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM

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devoted to the development of other professional skills (collaborating and innovating). The emphasis on innovation and entrepreneurship in societal context will increase. All engineering students will be required to understand the role of engineering entrepreneurship in taking technologies to society, including through the creation of commercial enterprises. The need to be able to collaborate effectively will take on an increased urgency. All engineering students will, in particular, need to develop the experience and attitude needed to work globally, in collaborations with people with different cultural perspectives. Graduate education will become increasingly important and all students planning a career in engineering will complete a MS professional degree. The BS degree will allow an “early escape” for those using undergraduate engineering education as a springboard for other professions. The PhD degree will become more professionally focused, possibly along with alternative advanced professional degrees. The demand for more customization of engineering education will grow, to suit the diverse career plans of a new generation of students who have increased expectations of institutions that serve them [33]. This will increase the number of electives within disciplines and the offering of interdisciplinary degrees.

Fundamental to the WPI Plan, introduced in the early 1970s, is the acknowledgment that education consists of providing the student with the technical competency needed to accomplish certain tasks and the professional maturity to decide what tasks to take on. In the original incarnation of the Plan a student could acquire technical skills anyway he or she chose, but had to pass a test to prove his or her competency. The competency exam proved to be too far ahead of its time (they were tedious to administer and unpopular with the students) and soon gave way to more conventional “distribution requirements” for courses. The professional maturity part of the plan, on the other hand, focused on project work and has been an unqualified success. WPI currently requires student to do two major projects, usually done in the junior and the senior year. The senior project is a capstone experience that demonstrates application of the skills, methods, and knowledge in the student’s chosen discipline to the solution of a problem representative of the type to be encountered in their career. In the junior project, on the other hand, the students “address a problem that lies at the intersection of technology and society.” Many junior projects are done at global projects centers, often located in the developing world, and currently over half of all students at WPI do at least one project abroad. The WPI Projects Program, including the junior and senior projects,

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as well as the Global Perspectives Program, is discussed in more detail in Chapters 6, 8 and 14. The WPI project experiences are focused on developing the student’s professional mindset and prepare them to work collaboratively in an innovative, entrepreneurial, and global world. While WPI currently teaches the technical competencies necessary for the practice of engineering in a relatively conventional way, the emergence of “advance personalized learning” systems, where competencies can be acquired and assessed outside of the classroom, will allow the original philosophy of the plan to be revisited. Although the WPI Plan is now 40 years old, the faculty has continued to introduce educational innovations. The Global Perspectives Program was, for example, not part of the original plan. The WPI curriculum is designed to be relatively flexible and this flexibility has profound implications for how changes can be introduced. The flexibility does, in particular, encourage faculty entrepreneurship and experimentation. New ideas can be introduced and examined outside of the mainstream, and allowed to gradually gain their place in the curriculum, in a way somewhat reminiscent of Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovations [23]. Recent innovations include a Great Problem Seminar series designed to introduce first year students to projectbased learning and ignite their passion for tackling tough and important problems, and the first undergraduate Robotics Engineering Program in the United States. The Great Problem Seminars series is described in Chapter 5 and the Robotics Engineering Program in Chapter 10. 1.5 CONCLUSION It is unthinkable that our society can remain competitive and that we can sustain the present standard of living without a large number of people with the knowledge and know-how to innovate [1,2]. In the early days of our nation’s birth, Noah Webster claimed that democracy succeeds and prevails only if the people have economic and educational hope, and that these two are closely interlinked. To educate engineers ready to face the challenges of tomorrow, we must appreciate how profoundly the world has changed from just a few decades ago. With skill becoming a commodity, the engineer of the future must be able to do more than just perform technical tasks. There have always been extraordinary engineers who have had the imagination, vision, dedication, and endurance to change the way we live. Those who did not, however, were in the past able to make a living performing routine engineering tasks. The young engineers of the future must, on the other hand, all be extraordinary. They will not be able to enjoy the comfort of well-paid jobs where routine tasks are performed more or less unchanged year after year. More and more

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the engineer of the future will be responsible for creating new ideas and solutions and seeing them through. Innovation has already been identified as one of the most important factors in the future prosperity of both nations and individuals [1,2,7,8,34]. The engineering challenges are, however, even greater. Not only must the engineer innovate, he or she must also be able to help the innovation become a reality. Thus, the education of the engineers of the future must prepare them to see new opportunities as well as to give them the skills needed to marshal the resources to realize their ideas. We believe that engineering education needs to be transformed, and that such a transformation must include reengineering the curriculum to focus on and nurture the creative aspect of engineering.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The discussion here borrows heavily from an earlier article, originally published in JOM [20].

REFERENCES 1. J. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 2. D.S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Why Some Are so Rich and Some so Poor. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. 3. L.E. Grinter, “Report of the Committee on Evaluation of Engineering Education,” Journal of Engineering Education, pp. 25–60, Sept. 1955. Reprinted in Journal of Engineering Education, pp. 74–95, June 2009. Available: http:// www.asee.org/resources/beyond/grinter.cfm. 4. Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, (U.S.). Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007. Available: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309100399/html/index.html. 5. Tapping America’s, Potential. The Education for Innovation Initiative. Washington, DC: Business Roundtable, 2005. Available: http://www.businessroundtable. org/pdf/20050803001TAPfinalnb.pdf. 6. National Science Foundation. The Engineering Workforce: Current State, Issues, and Recommendations. Final Report to the Assistant Directorof Engineering, 2005. Available: www.nsf.gov/attachments/104206/public/Final_Workforce.doc 7. The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004. Available: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/ 10999.html.

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8. Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004. 9. See, for example, eMachineShop.com. “eMachineShop.com: Machine Custom Parts Online.” 2010. Available: http://www.emachineshop.com. 10. J. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, New York: Penguin, 2005. 11. M. Yunus, A World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, New York: Public Affairs, 2007. 12. A. Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. New York: Rodale Press, 2006. 13. L.R. Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble. New York: Norton, 2006. 14. E.E. Lewis, Masterworks of Technology: The Story of Creative Engineering, Architecture and Design. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004. 15. J.J. Duderstadt, Engineering for a Changing World. A Roadmap to the Future of Engineering Practice, Research, and Education. Ann Arbor, MI: The Millennium Project, University of Michigan, 2008. Available: http://milproj.dc.umich.edu/pdfs/ 2009/Engineering%20for%20a%20Changing%20World.pdf. 16. D. Apelian, “Re-engineering of Engineering Education—Paradigms and Paradoxes,” Alpha Sigma Mu invited lecture, presented at the ASM Fall meeting, Pittsburgh, PA, October 18, 1993; Advanced Materials & Processes, vol. 145, no. 6, pp. 110–114, June 1994. 17. S.C. Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. 18. L.E. Grayson, The Making of an Engineer: An Illustrated History of Engineering Education in the United States and Canada. New York: Wiley, 1993. 19. B.M. Gordon, “Engineering Education Must Get Real,” New England Journal of Higher Education, pp. 28–29, Summer 2007. 20. G. Tryggvason and D. Apelian, “Re-Engineering Engineering Education for the Challenges of the 21st Century.” Commentary in JOM: The Member Journal of TMS, October 2006. Reprinted in IEEE Engineering Management Review, vol. 37, pp. 38–43, 2009. Also translated into Chinese (China University Teaching, vol. 12, pp. 84–86, 2008). 21. See, for example, Apple, Inc. “Mac Basic Tutorials: Find Out How.” 2010. Available: http://www.apple.com/findouthow/mac/. 22. The Mathworks website has several tutorials and interactive sessions. See, for example, Mathworks, Inc. “MATLAB Tutorial.” 2010. Available: http://www. mathworks.com/academia/student_center/tutorials/launchpad.html. 23. C.M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1997. 24. See, for example, JEDM—Journal of Educational Data Mining. Available: http://www.educationaldatamining.org/JEDM/.

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25. See, for example, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. Available: http://jcal.info/. 26. P.C. Wankat and F.S. Oreovicz, Teaching Engineering. New York: Knovel, 1993. Available: http://www.knovel.com/web/portal/basic_search/ display?_EXT_KNOVEL_DISPLAY_bookid¼1287. 27. ABET Board of Directors, “Criteria for Accrediting Engineering Programs.” 2008. Available: http://www.abet.org/Linked%20Documents-UPDATE/Criteria %20and%20PP/E001%2009-10%20EAC%20Criteria%2012-01-08.pdf. 28. T.L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. 29. R.H. Thaler and C.R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. 30. D. Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. 31. J. Lehrer, How we Decide. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 2009. 32. M. Grunwald, “How Obama is Using the Science of Change.” Time Magazine, vol. 173, no. 14, pp. 28–32, April 23, 2009. 33. N. Howe, W. Strauss, and R.J. Matson, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. New York: Vintage, 2000. 34. C.R. Carlson and W.W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. New York: Crown Business, 2006.

CHAPTER 2

ONE WORLD: PREPARING ENGINEERS FOR THE GLOBAL ECONOMY MICHAEL J. DOLAN

2.1 INTRODUCTION The evolution of the engineering professions has been well described in Chapter 1. Engineering remains an evolving profession. From its earliest roots as a repository of practical knowledge to the more recent focus on application of sound science and mathematical techniques, the one constant about the engineering profession is change. Engineering is dynamic and change is accelerating. It is always difficult to see what the future might be. Futurists are notoriously wrong on the details but right on the pace of change. Engineers provide tremendous value to society. They are the doers and the problem solvers. Generation after generation of engineers has helped improve standards of living around the world by applying science and technology to solve world problems. Because of their efforts, life spans are longer and living standards are higher. The world is a smaller place. The engineering profession will change in response to the needs of the society. Engineers are at their core problem solvers and so the needs of society (i.e., the current problems to be solved) will impact the nature of the engineering profession. And the engineering profession will evolve in response to the tools (such as information technology and computer simulation) available to the practitioners. This will help drive how work gets done. And finally, the engineering profession will evolve in response to the advance of basic science and understanding. Engineers use science as a key input and help deploy science to solve practical problems. As science advances, engineering

Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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must change to be effective conduits of new understanding to solve problems and meet societal needs. Of course the world has changed. The last generation of engineers went from the slide rule to the supercomputer; from the local design shop to the global delivery of engineering services; from engineer as “holder of knowledge” to engineer as team member and mentor; from a world of tightly controlled traditional engineering disciplines to multidisciplinary engineering teams blending the emerging sciences of computers and biology with the traditional engineering disciplines. As we look to the future of the profession and the way we educate our engineers, we must provide students with a robust tool kit that will help them not only grow professionally but also help them evolve as the needs of society and the tools at their disposal change. 2.2 ALL THINGS TO ALL MEN Engineers provide a variety of services in today’s world economy. These services run the gamut from routine and repetitive to novel and entrepreneurial. And yet all are important and all needs must be met. Engineers design foundations and roadways and piping and electrical networks. They support ongoing operations and manage large projects and maintenance activities. Many of these tasks have been commoditized as globalization occurred. In many ways, the traditional functions that engineers in these sectors perform have not changed much over the years but in other ways the change is profound. The way the work gets done has profoundly changed. No longer is it done in small offices with tables and charts. New computer tools serve as data and technique repositories accessible to all practitioners. With modern communication technologies, tasks can be performed anywhere there is expertise. In addition to technical competence, efficiency will be key. Although reduced in value over the years, these commodity engineering tasks still are needed and represent the highest volume of engineering services. But to adapt, the engineer needs new skills to harness the value in the new tools and access the highest valued talent in engineering centers around the world. Team work, management skills, and cultural awareness along with strong basic engineering competencies are all needed and valued. There is a continuum of engineering services that define the current landscape for engineers. At the other end, perhaps, is the engineer as integrator and entrepreneur. This is a role that engineers have always played. Certainly Edison and Westinghouse over a hundred years ago would be among the engineering entrepreneurs. It is an area of very high “value add.” It is also by

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its nature the most difficult to define. These engineers must be well schooled in the basic competencies like mathematics and science as well as disciplinespecific topics. But the value added comes from blending strong basic engineering competencies with other skills. They must have an almost innate ability to assess market needs to see where opportunities exist. They most often have to integrate their discipline with others such as the soft science of marketing or with technical disciplines like computing or biotechnology. Often the best new ideas are found in the “white space” between traditional disciplines. The way this work gets done is largely on high performing, interdisciplinary teams, which places a premium on communication skills, good team skills and, increasingly, the ability to work across time zones and cultures. Participants must be conversant in the language of science, the language of business, and the language of engineering. By way of an example a third and perhaps newly emerging engineering role on this continuum is where technology overlaps with public policy. The world has great problems to solve like poverty, hunger, water scarcity, poor access to health care, and resource sustainability. The problems are very technical and the solutions will be increasingly technology based. Policy is increasingly more technically demanding and policy makers correctly look to engineers and scientists to provide input on both practical solutions and unintended consequences. For every action there is a reaction. And for every step forward by mankind there is an impact on the environment. As policy makers assess the various equities involved in their decisions, engineers can be valuable partners. Indeed, decision-making would benefit from having more engineers directly involved as policy makers to help bring the discipline of the scientific method to the world of policy. Thoughtful policy development that provides incentives for new technology development and stimulates free market solutions will be needed to solve these problems at the very large-scale they exist in the world of today. Engineers can play an important role to help policy makers set reasonable expectations for technological solutions. Although the pace of life has quickened, technologically development can still be a difficult and lengthy process often at odds with short time frames of the political world. Engineers working in this area will need to be well grounded in mathematics, science, and engineering. They will need to be capable team members and excellent communicators. And they will need a high awareness of the world around them and an understanding of the political process, which can often be frustrating to solution-oriented engineers. They will need to know how engineering can impact society and understand how public policy can interact with science, technology, and business. In my own career I have seen the power of engineers as policy advocates both at home and abroad. Their solution orientation coupled with the sincere

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and straightforward approach favored by engineers can be very powerful when combined with an understanding of societal needs and political pragmatism. 2.3 SO WHAT DO WE WANT AND WHAT DO WE NEED? Although this question fits well here, I must admit that I learned a long time ago not to ask it. As a young engineer I had a boss whose only answer to this regardless of context was “more, better, faster.” I stopped asking not because I knew what his answer would be, but because I realized that this is what the world wants and what society needs. It is the same for us in engineering education if we are to meet the great challenges of the twenty-first century and if we are to provide our new engineers the toolkit to carry them through a tempestuous 40-year career. Let us Start with More: Like a modern day Oliver Twist, society wants more. More of what engineers do. Solve problems. Find solutions. Create new things. Add more value. For engineers this starts with the hard engineering competencies. The engineer of the future will need to be well schooled in the basics of engineering science – perhaps more so than in the past. Many of the basic tasks are now codified in the new tools (computer databases, simulations, and the like) and this new way of working presents practicing engineers with new challenges. Practicing engineers have had a tremendous boost in productivity with these new tools. This means that more data and more designs will pass by the practicing engineer for his or her stamp of approval. Each design, no matter how basic, still needs the highest level of quality control, despite the speed of today’s engineering environment. In times past every design made its way to the chief engineer who was the final quality check and the repository or information, know-how, and experience. Today, the simulation and design tools are the repository themselves. They create tremendous benefits in how knowledge gets shared around the world as quickly as electrons can flow. In many offices, the practicing engineer is the sole quality control check as the pace of work accelerates. A better grounding in the basics will enable the practicing engineer to understand better the output from the new tools so that they can ensure that work is still performed to the high standard that society expects. And Then There is Better: The engineer plays an ever-increasing role as the integrator and entrepreneur. Our new engineers will need a deeper understanding of science, engineering, and mathematics than we had 40 years ago. We cannot skip the basics, and in fact should move some

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graduate-level topics into the undergraduate program to give students a more complete fundamental grounding in their discipline. And the curriculum will need to have capstone professional experiences (like the Major Qualifying Project at WPI discussed elsewhere in this text) to give students a richer technical experience valuable to their professional development. Not all engineers will serve in these high value-added roles. But those who do will need to be exposed to the soft sciences of marketing and economics. They will need to have good team skills and understand the nature of innovation. The nature of work has changed and continues to change. How work gets done continues to evolve. Every day it becomes less individualized and more team-based. Every day it becomes less local and more global. Every day it becomes more interdisciplinary and less traditional. As a result, soft skills will be in demand even more in the future. Working on teams, listening, writing, speaking, and presenting ideas clearly are among the skills that engineers must develop: Challenging ideas and looking for ways to add value throughout the innovation process. And again we need more. We need higher levels of competence. Team-based models should be used throughout the curriculum whenever possible. Group problem-solving techniques should be taught as a first step in helping students develop innovation skills. And teams are increasingly diverse. Not just in the disciplines brought to bear on a problem but often times across time zones and cultures. Cultural awareness is increasingly important and can be fostered through structured learning and through project work (the WPI Interactive Qualifying Project and International Project Centers discussed elsewhere in this book are excellent vehicles for this). And Finally Faster: The world is a flatter place. Time zones are compressed. Work moves around the world at the speed of electrons. And engineering is done where it can add the most value. The result is an everchanging landscape for the practicing engineer. Our new engineers must understand change and change management. They must embrace the change as a positive aspect of their careers. Engineers will find themselves working on global problems and on problems for global clients. They will find customers for their ideas and services in the global market place. They will collaborate with others who are distant from them either elsewhere in their country or elsewhere in the world. Understanding the global nature of work and how to work with diverse customers and business partners will be valuable skills. In the new world of speed and global competition, the education of engineers must also focus on professional integrity and ethics. With

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less oversight and the demand for rapid solutions, the checks and balances of the engineering profession have been somewhat eroded. The chief engineer no longer checks all the calculations and assumptions. And operation in other cultures with different standards and mores can take decisions, which a generation ago were “black and white” and make them appear “gray.” For engineers in the field it can start small: a look past some obvious impacts to meet a deadline, a failure to check data reasonability, or a misstatement of facts. The acceptance of perceived cultural norms in developing parts of the world not in line with good engineering practice can provide an excuse to compromise ethics. The engineering curriculum must include ethics and integrity embedded in the courses and projects as discussions, scenarios, and role plays. Ethical challenges often come at night or over the weekend. They pop up when deadlines loom and cost pressures increase, and often in far away places given the global nature of engineering today. Young engineers must be sensitized to these issues. Good ethics and professional integrity makes for good business results and for professional success. Our engineering colleagues in Canada have a wonderful tradition of reminding graduating engineers of the importance of integrity and ethical practice. When an engineering student graduates in Canada, he or she takes part in a special ceremony called the “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer.” It is closed to the public and all nonengineers. Like the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors, the “Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer” invites graduates to understand the ethics and obligations of their career. On this solemn occasion, the engineering graduate receives a ring to wear on the little finger of the working hand (i.e., the hand they draw with). The ring is designed to rub against the drawings and designs of the engineer, serving as a constant reminder of the ceremony—and the ethical obligations of our profession every day. 2.4 SUMMARY The world will change over the working life of these new graduates in ways we cannot imagine. We know that the constant will be change and the pace of change will be ever increasing. We know that the world will be increasingly technical and that solutions to the world’s problems will need more and better-trained engineers. We know that the strong trend we see today toward globalization of work (especially technical work) will increasingly provide new competition for our engineering graduates from all corners of the world.

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Engineers will need: . . . . . . . .

Above all else, good grounding in the basics of their discipline. A deep fundamental understanding of their area of concentration to remain competitive as basic engineering skills become commoditized. Excellent computer and modeling skills to improve productivity and knowledge transfer and sharing. Practice in the tools of innovation and team dynamics. A love of learning throughout their career and an understanding that both engineering and the way work is done will evolve and change. An ability to work in a team-based environment and to appreciate interdisciplinary ideas. An acceptance of the globalization of work and the opportunities it creates as well as an appreciation for diverse cultures. And a devotion to professional integrity and ethical engineering practice.

The education of engineers is a shared responsibility between the university, the student, and ultimately the employer. It is unreasonable to expect that the university alone can achieve all of this. Universities should focus on the top items on this list and set high standards for building these skills and competencies. We should avoid the trap of cutting out the fundamentals to make room for the enrichment. To the degree that the remaining items on the list can be integrated into the curriculum in creative ways, the new engineer will have a powerful foundation for building a successful career in whatever direction she or he decides to go.

CHAPTER 3

ENGINEERS: LEADERS, INNOVATORS, AND BUILDERS DIRAN APELIAN

3.1 INTRODUCTION: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS It was in the early 1990s, a wintry night. I was meeting up with Michel Besson, the newly appointed CEO of Saint-Gobain/Norton at the Worcester Club. Besson had just moved from CertainTeed Corp. in Valley Forge, PA, and I had just moved to WPI from Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. We knew each other from Philadelphia days, and we were meeting up to catch up and to reconnect in New England. Mr. Besson had just flown in from Paris with his executive team. As we sat down over a glass of wine, he told me that he was puzzled by the cultural differences of the role of engineers in America versus France. Michel told me that when he filled the customs form at Logan entering the US from France, he, being a CEO, had named his occupation as Engineer/ Ingenieur, whereas his executive team members, who held advanced degrees in engineering, identified themselves as Vice President, Head of Marketing, and so on. Interestingly, that same week I had seen a print ad for Marriot hotels where a man, dressed in blue overalls, is changing the bulb in a table lamp. The tagline read “Our engineers work around the clock to serve you.” This image of an “engineer” was contrary to my knowledge of the profession and it so irked me that I wrote Mr. Marriot himself to address the ad’s incorrect interpretation of what engineers do. Soon thereafter, the ads ceased to run. This is in contrast to the ad that Credit Suisse ran in the Economist in the spring of 2010—see inset. Here the engineer is portrayed as a successful professional.

Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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My family migrated to America in 1960 when I was 15 years old; we arrived into New York harbor, passing the Statue of Liberty, a sight that is etched in my mind. Before coming to America, I had gone to a Lycee in Beirut, Lebanon, and was well versed in several languages except English, and yet I felt no fear. If anything, the feelings of hope and the opportunities that awaited us in the new land were so profound and huge that it overshadowed any doubts or uncertainties. You see, I had the same perceptions as Mr. Besson about engineering as a profession. I had the good fortune to have some wonderful mentors when I was at the Lycee, and family members, who had made it quite clear to me that as an engineer, I could be a banker, a businessman, a statesman (a better term than a politician), a leader of industry, or anything I wanted to do. So from a young age, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a difference, and I wanted to be in charge of the journey. I wanted to be an engineer when I grew up.

3.2 SOCIETAL CONTEXT As we have discussed in Chapter 1, engineering has a rich history throughout civilization. Engineers solve problems, make things happen, and enhance the

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quality of life on this planet. This has always been a constant; however, what changed over time have been the needs of our society and how engineers have responded to those needs. The historical record of engineering accomplishments before and after the Renaissance is a testimonial to the will and ingenuity of early engineers; and this is before there were engineering schools. Leonardo da Vinci and his works and journals are also a testimonial of a genius at work. A few hours in the Duomo in Florence, Italy points out the genius of the master engineer Filippo Brunelleschi; however, when one studies the details of how the Duomo [1] came to be, one understands that the early engineers were innovators, businessmen, and leaders. Up to the Industrial Revolution, a nation’s GDP and population were linearly related and an agrarian society prevailed. Before the 1800s, countries such as China and India had larger GDPs than the US or the UK. During the late 1800s, engineers were responsible for profound innovations and inventions to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution. Engineers made things, built bridges, and established mass production; in so doing they transformed us from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Moreover, with the advent of the Industrial revolution, the paradigm changed and we witnessed the GDPs of western countries grow irrespective to their population. A country such as England with a population of 20 million people experienced productivity increases that were unprecedented. The Industrial Revolution changed the “game”; many countries were left behind, with the West leading the economic growth. In the 1900s with the advances in solid-state physics and our understanding of the atomic structure, engineers learned science and became scientists because they needed the science base to solve the problems facing society. This includes the needs for defense (A-bomb, supersonic aircrafts, weaponry) to the development of the semiconductor, and the electronic materials revolution (Information age), among many other inventions. As one looks back and reflects on the last 60 years, what is most astounding is the number of discoveries and events that occurred, which have significantly altered our lives [2]: Sputnik’s launch into outer space (1957); lasers (1958); silicon single crystals grown for semiconductors (1960); man landing on the moon (1969); soft contact lenses (1972); CAT scan (1972) and MRI (1981) diagnostics; PCs introduced (1981) and world wide web available to the masses (1991); and not to mention the end of the cold war in 1989. Could we have predicted these discoveries and events back in 1957? I do not think so. However, one thing that is constant over time is human innovation and creativity, the engineer’s ability to address societal needs, and the entrepreneurial spirit of engineering. I believe that going forward, one thing we can bet on is man’s ability to innovate and address societal needs. We entered the twentieth century with 1.6 billion people, and exited the twentieth century with 6.1 billion people. By the end of 2010, we have 7 billion inhabitants on our planet. For the first time in the history of the world, we

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have witnessed that in a short period of two decades (1980–2000) one third of the world population increased its quality of life significantly. With flattening of the world, the playing field has leveled out. You can think of rebooting or resetting of the world—call it World 2.0, or as Bill Mckibben has titled his recent book, eaarth (different than the present planet as we know it: Earth) [3]. As we enter the twenty-first century, globalization and “flattening of the World” is a reality that is transforming the role of engineers and engineering. For the twenty-first century, engineers need to be enterprising and must lead to address the needs of our society (global society). With 18% of the population lacking access to safe drinking water, 40% having no access to sanitation, energy consumption increasing at a higher rate than population growth, and health care needs and expectations increasing out of sync with the cost of health care delivery, there is no doubt that the engineer for the twenty-first century has to be a social scientist and an enterprising leader to meet these needs. During the twenty-first century we will see our world population increase to about 9.5 billion people and much of this growth will occur in the developing nations. Societal needs regarding energy resources, transportation, housing needs, materials recovery and recycling, and biomaterials and health will only escalate. The challenges we face for a sustainable development of the globe are immense. This is precisely why engineering should be so attractive to the next generation; we need to make the case that engineering is an enabling profession. The case for engineering as an enabling profession for sustainable development of the globe is powerful; however, this connection is not explicitly made. As Oliver Morton recently wrote in the Economist [4]: “It’s all very well to recycle, pester your parents about fuel efficiency and aspire to holidays that need no flights. But the best thing a bright young person can do to help rid civilization of fossil fuels is get an education in engineering.”

3.3 HUMAN RESOURCE ISSUES The dilemma we are facing in the US is that the interest in engineering is declining and more significantly it is declining within white males [5]. Furthermore, if we examine the “production” of engineering graduates around the globe, we in the US lag many of the G8 countries. In China about 20% of university students are studying engineering; in Germany and other parts of Europe it is in the lower teens, whereas in the US it is less than 5%. What is most alarming is the poor performance of our students in the basic sciences in comparison to many other countries [6]. It is clear that much work needs to be

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done to revitalize the interest in engineering, and to articulate that engineering is a social enterprise. Engineering curricula have become a commodity and are now available to students all over the world via the net. What will differentiate the US engineering graduates from those in other countries? To remain competitive, we must graduate innovative leaders for an increasingly technological society. Innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship as well as the societal context of engineering ought to be central to the new curriculum for the twenty-first century. Linkages between the engineering profession and societal needs ought to be explicitly articulated; the latter will inspire and attract students to the profession. At present, the public’s image of engineers and engineering does not reflect reality. It is a fact that many of our top industrialists and successful CEOs are engineers; we have many surgeons and physicians whose first degree is in engineering. We have bankers and financial tycoons who are educated as engineers. There is no limit. The image of engineering needs to be changed to reflect the boundless opportunities and lifestyles that await our graduates. Perhaps we need to revert back to the image of the Polytechnicien when the Grands Ecoles were founded back in 1794; we need to engage our young about the leadership opportunities engineering offers. Moreover, we need to have a unified message. At present, the message regarding engineering as a career path is fragmented. The message articulated by civil engineers (ASCE), mechanical engineers (ASME), metallurgists and materials scientists and engineers (ASM, TMS), electrical engineers (IEEE), and chemical engineers (AIChE) is not the same. The various messages differ and they ought to be the same—we need a unified message. The National Academy of Engineering has made great strides in this vein by launching “Changing the Conversation” initiative [7]. Perceptions and cultural perspectives take time to change; however, the effort needs to be vigilant and persistent.

3.4 ENGINEERING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITIES Sustainable development in the twenty-first century is perhaps the most pressing issue we face. At the same time, as pointed out above, it is the best of times for engineering; the future is bright as we are entering a different era where the innovation economy will prevail. Thomas Malthus observed back in the 1700s that population was growing faster than agricultural production in England. Population growing geometrically and the food supply increasing arithmetically. We have come a long way in agricultural innovations to feed more people than we could have ever

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imagined. However, with the burgeoning earth population, the real question is not how many people the earth can support but how many people the earth can support with what quality of life? Sustainable development is the key. Sustainable development is the level of human activity that can meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Although there are many challenges we face, there are five distinct ones that will be discussed here pertinent to engineering. These challenges offer a vista of opportunities for the next generation of engineers. 3.4.1 Energy The global demand for energy is growing at alarming rates, and the demand from developing countries will further exacerbate the situation. The current energy utilization worldwide is about 14 terawatts, and by the end of the twenty-first century, it may reach 50 terawatts [8]. There has to be a shift to renewable energy sources from fossil fuels, which today supply about 80% of the world’s energy. Earth-based renewable sources of energy (i.e., hydroelectricity, wind, geothermal, biomass, etc.) will not be sufficient to meet the energy consumption needs of the world. Solar power will certainly be an important resource. We will see future material developments in nanostructured materials, advanced photovoltaic materials such as nanocrystalline Si thin films and novel chalcogenides, advanced catalysts with more accessible surface area, nanostructured catalyst supports, and membranes. LEDs with enhanced quantum efficiency for lighting devices will also play an important role The outlook is optimistic, especially when we see initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the US and in certain European Nations—for example, Finland. In the US, a tenth of venture capital is invested in clean energy. The Economist estimates that the total investments going into clean energy in 2006 was $63 billion (versus $49 billion in 2005 and $30 billion in 2004) [9]. Tekes, the National Technology Agency of Finland announced targets for increases in total consumption of renewable energy by 40% by the year 2025 [2,10]. 3.4.2 Transportation Global consumption will increase significantly in the next few decades, especially when some of the developing countries are experiencing annual growth rates of around 8% for several years in succession. In 1995, bicycles were the predominant mode of transportation on the streets of Beijing; today cars have replaced bicycles. The contrast is astounding. Transportation is a

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basic human need, and we need to develop future materials and modes of transportation to meet the demands of our society in a sustainable way. Public transportation will need to be the dominant means of transporting the masses. This certainly has been effective in Japan, France, and many other European countries. Developments will occur in high-speed trains and the infrastructural needs to accommodate these lines will be challenging. Lightweight structural materials, specifically alloy development and processing will be the focus of future materials—that is, foamed structures, magnesiumbased components, and advanced aluminum alloys that can be selectively stiffened. Future materials will certainly include innovative material uses such as recyclable composites, and biocomposites. Duralin fibers (made by Ceres in the Netherlands) are produced when flax straw is steamed, dried, and cured [2]. Strong and lightweight materials, sustainability and material recyclability will be some of the major factors influencing the development of future materials for our transportation needs. However, technology alone is not the answer. We need leadership in developing national policies not solely by lawyers but engineers. The role of advocacy that our professional engineering societies must shoulder is pivotal and needs to be supported. 3.4.3 Housing Housing has always been a fundamental human need. With increasing world population, the engineering community has an opportunity to make a major impact by developing novel construction materials that are sustainable, green, and energy efficient, as well as construction materials that are affordable for the masses. World poverty is not receding. Today, nearly three billion people, almost half the world population, live on less than two and half dollars per day [2]. Globalization is wonderful in that it thrives on market economies and promotes democracy. However, the latter does not necessarily mean that wealth will be distributed evenly. There are many local issues in the less developed countries, and the solutions need to be local ones. Shelter needs for the world population requires novel material solutions and novel housing designs. In the future, we will see more energy-efficient homes that use intelligent materials and intelligent designs. As an example, the Institute of Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg, Germany discovered a means to integrate the temperature equalizing effect of thick walls within a millimeter thin layer of plaster [11]. The impact on energy savings, reduction of pollutants is significant. The premise is that much more needs to be done in this whole arena of intelligent materials that are green and energy efficient—a fertile area for engineering discoveries and innovations.

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Future developments will be realized through innovative design and collaboration with architects and builders. The engineering community has an opportunity to partner with leading architects to address energy efficient and sustainable construction materials, as well as providing shelter needs for the masses. 3.4.4 Material Resources Recovery and Recycling Between 1960 and 2000, the municipal solid waste generated in the US increased from 88 million to 232 million tons. On average, each American produced 4.5 pounds of garbage each day in 2000 (up from 2.7 pounds in 1960). This waste is either burned (emitting pollutants) or deposited in landfills introducing toxic substances to groundwater and the soil [12]. If we examine the toxic materials that are found in municipal solid waste, there is need for concern. It is astounding that one third of the world’s copper is found in landfills [13]. Future world needs will require materials that are recyclable or biodegradable, and a whole new paradigm for designing components by adopting a cradle-to-cradle philosophy. Recycling of metals will be a critical technology in the world of tomorrow; it is certainly an important technology today; however, the need for recycling will escalate enormously as the world’s appetite for consumption increases. Recycling 1 kg of aluminum saves up to 6 kg of bauxite, 4 kg of chemical products, and 14 kWh of electricity [14]. Sorting of metals rapidly, and sorting them by their specific composition will allow us to recycle effectively and efficiently. Moreover, with increasing sources of scrap (e.g., beverage cans), and with enabling technologies that allow rapid recycling as well as rapid melt cognition (e.g., LIBS technology [15]), the concept of aluminum mini-mills will be a reality. We need to keep in mind that inorganic materials are not renewable, and the opportunities are vast when it comes to resource recovery and recycling. 3.4.5 Biomaterials and Health Life expectancy over the years has increased significantly. During the last five decades alone, life expectancy has risen by 15% (from 69 to 80 years) in North America, and we see similar trends across the globe except for Sub-Saharan Africa [2]. More importantly, not only are we living longer, however, life quality has dramatically improved thanks to the many advances in medicine, biology, and materials science and engineering. We have seen tremendous advances in biomaterials. The market potential for structural tissue engineering is between $90 and $100 billion, and for the biomaterials industry R&D growth spending is about 24% a year [16]. Recent

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advances and developments include: cornea tissue regeneration, artificial skin (e.g., Epicel manufactured by Genzyme Corp., Cambridge, MA), caticel implantation in the perosteal flap, and so on. Devices such as artificial heart valves (e.g., mitral valve), coronary stents, and particularly drug eluting stents have seen significant utilization for the benefit of society [2]. These developments are critically dependent on the advances that have been made, and continue to be made in materials science and engineering. Implantable medical devices have seen a huge growth during the last decade. Hip joints, artificial knees, spinal cord fusion devices, and many other parts are now being replaced, on almost routine basis. Thus in the last two decades alone we have witnessed medical advances that have profoundly improved quality of life; the unfortunate part is that many parts of the globe can neither afford these advances nor do they have access to such medical services. In the future, we will see major developments in the area of surface modification of biomaterials to better control blood and tissue compatibility; biomaterials can be modified by plasma treatment or by chemical grafting [17]. Through surface modification, we will be able to manipulate material attributes such as resistance to infection, resistance to clot formation, lubricity and wear resistance. A good example is how heparin (an anticoagulant) is covalently coupled to a multilayered base coat of a biomaterial surface [17]. Implants and devices that are also vehicles for drug delivery will be another area for future developments. Examples of such devices are steroid releasing pacing electrodes and drug eluting stents. Tissue engineering coupled with innovative materials for the manufacture of “smart” heart valves is another area for growth and opportunities for future developments. The whole field of biomaterials for regenerative medicine is a fertile area; S.I. Stupp [18] has recently reviewed these opportunities and cites many examples for the use of biomaterials for regenerative medicine. One example is how we might use biomaterials to regenerate insulin-producing cells of the pancreas from stem cells. In order to create the necessary bioactive architectures, supramolecular chemistry and self-assembly of atoms will be critical for the development of regenerative medicine. In brief, biomaterials of the future will not solely serve mechanical functions; rather they will be regulators of biological activity. In the future, we will see major advances in bioorganic–inorganic composites; at present, bioerodable polyanhydrides are being synthesized as vehicles to release large as well as small molecules. In the future, we will see this field blossoming to carry out “local chemotherapy” [19]. Langer has pioneered the field of drug release systems; he and his colleagues developed controlled release of large molecules (e.g., polypeptide) by using microspheres made of hydrophobic polymers [19]. The approach of synthesis and application of bioerodable polymers for implantable tissue scaffolds will be used to create

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liver tissue, blood vessels, nerves, and heart muscle [20]. R.M. Bergman of Medtronic Inc. sees that in the future “InfoTech plus Biotech will transform health care” [17]. Fusion of information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and neural networks will allow us to not only prevent but also cure disease. The difficult issues we will face in the future are not technological ones, but rather ethical ones. Imagine what will be the consequence of being able to know the prognosis for disease and especially a life-threatening disease in a newborn. How will insurance companies assess risk and how will society cope with these issues? The future is bright for medical advances as a result of the developments in engineering; what we have seen in the recent past is only the beginning. The difficult questions will be societal ones: will health care only benefit those that can afford it? How do we cope with inequalities across the globe? Lastly, we will need to address the ethical issues that will arise by knowing a priori a person’s propensity for disease and poor health. Thus the importance of the engineer’s role as a social scientist!

3.5 CONCLUDING COMMENTS It is unthinkable that our society can remain competitive and that we can sustain the present standard of living without a large number of people with the knowledge and know-how to innovate. This is a plea to all engineering educators. We need everyone’s ingenuity to reach out and to make the case as to why engineering education is a compelling journey, and that the career paths engineers have are exciting, diverse, and certainly lead to satisfying lives. We should focus on the positives and the attributes that speak to the next generation of students; namely: making a world of difference through engineering! This is in contrast to the old adage that “engineering is difficult, and that you must be excellent in math and sciences.” This is akin to “selling” the field of medicine by focusing on how many loans one would incur, how long the journey is, and how little sleep one would get throughout med school. Let us make the case for engineering by linking the profession to societal issues, and that engineering is an enabling profession. In the early days of our nation’s birth, Noah Webster claimed that democracy succeeds and prevails only if the people have economic and educational hope, and that these two are closely interlinked. To educate engineers ready to face the challenges of tomorrow we must appreciate how profoundly the world has changed from just a few decades ago. Moreover, we need to embrace these changes and move ahead to ensure that the engineering profession is a social enterprise.

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We need to educate engineers that are more akin to the French Polytechnicien model: engineers that understand the societal context of their work, have an understanding of the human dimension around the globe, coupled with innovation and creativity. The challenge for us is daunting, both in academia as well as in corporate America. But we have no choice, as we need the human talent to address these issues. The curricular innovations that we present in the second part of this book—Effective Practices—offer much hope as to how we can achieve these goals.

REFERENCES 1. R. King, Brunelleschi’s Dome. New York: Penguin, 2001. 2. D. Apelian, “Looking Beyond the Last Fifty Years: The Future of Materials Science and Engineering.” Journal of Metals, vol. 59, no. 2, pp. 9–18, 2007. 3. B. McKibben, eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books, 2010. 4. O. Morton, “Wanted: Green Engineers,” The Economist, p. 32, Nov. 13, 2009. 5. R.J. Noeth, T. Cruce and M.T. Harmston, Maintaining a Strong Engineering Workforce, Policy Report. ACT: 2003. Available: http://www.act.org/research/ policymakers/pdf/engineer.pdf. 6. Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) “PISA 2009 Results.” OECD: 2010. Available: http://www.oecd.org/edu/pisa.2009 7. Changing the Conversation: Messages for Improving Public Understanding of Engineering. Washington, DC: National Academy of Engineering, 2008. 8. M.S. Dresselhaus, G.W. Crabtree and M.V. Buchanan, “Addressing Energy Challenges Through Advanced Materials,” MRS Bulletin, vol. 30, pp. 518–524, July 2005. 9. “Green Dreams,” The Economist, p. 13, Nov. 16, 2006. Available: http://www. economist.com/node/8173054. 10. “Tekesin Ohjelmat.” Tekes: 2010. Available: http://www.tekes.fi/ohjelmat/. 11. B. Niesing, “Storing Heat with Wax,” Fraunhofer Magazine, Adaptronics: Bringing Materials to Life, no. 1, 2004. 12. D.B. Spencer, wTe Corporation, Bedford, MA (corporate information). 13. R.B. Gordon, M. Bertram and T.E. Graedel, “Metal Stocks and Sustainability” PNAS, vol. 103, no. 5, Jan. 31, 2006. Available: http://www.mindfully.org/ Sustainability/2006/Metal-Stocks-Gordon31jan06.htm. 14. Waste Online “Metals—Aluminium and Steel Recycling,” Sept. 2005. Available: http://www.wasteonline.org.uk/resources/InformationSheets/metals.htm. 15. ERCo: Energy Research Company, 2010. Available: http://er-co.com/. 16. A. Courey, Genzyme Corporation, as presented at the MS&T lecture on Technology and Society, New Orleans, LA, Oct. 2004.

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17. R.M. Bergman, “Innovations in Biomaterials: Achievements and Opportunities,” MRS Bulletin, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 540–545, July 2005. 18. S.I. Stupp, “Biomaterials for Regenerative Medicine,” MRS Bulletin, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 546–553, July 2005. 19. “Materials Researchers Strut Their Stuff at the 2005 MRS Fall Meeting,” MRS Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 232–256, March 2006. 20. N.A. Peppas, “Intelligent Biomaterials as Pharmaceutical Carriers in Microfabricated and Nanoscale Devices,” MRS Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 11, pp. 888–893, 2006.

CHAPTER 4

HOLISTIC EDUCATION: LEARNING AND DOING IN CONTEXT DENNIS D. BERKEY

4.1 INTRODUCTION As in many of the engineering education programs founded in the nineteenth century, WPI’s curriculum from the outset emphasized both the mastery of relevant science and engineering principles. It was distinguished, however, by its additional requirement that students learn to engage in the actual production of useful tools and technologies. Indeed, WPI’s original two campus buildings dramatically reflected this duality: formal classroom instruction occurred in Boynton Hall, and students worked as apprentices to manufacture tools and technical devices in the neighboring Washburn shops. Both buildings were adorned by towers, which soon became symbols for the “two towers tradition” reflected in the Institute’s motto, Lehr und Kunst, commonly translated as “theory and practice.” These origins even contained roots for the present day controversy in higher education over the commercialization of the fruits of university labor. While the sale of products manufactured in the Washburn shops provided important revenue to the “Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science,” as WPI was originally known, some members of the faculty, and local merchants, regarded this production and sale of commercial product as inappropriate for a (nonprofit) educational institution—unfair to competing local merchants, or just unseemly. Others at the Institute argued that the marketplace provided an important test of the value of production, an important part of the students’ education and training, without which the lessons of the shop would be pointless.

Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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This and other controversies that arose over WPI’s nearly 150 years of existence reflected its continuing bold commitment to educate young men, and eventually young women, for the whole of life’s opportunities, responsibilities, and challenges. Indeed, this aspiration was reflected in the original intentions of the Institute’s founding donor [1,p. 14]: The intention of the donor is to furnish competent instruction in such applications of science to the mechanical arts, manufacturing, and agriculture, as will fit young men to engage in those branches of active industry with intelligence; also to fit young men for mercantile life by a thorough course of training in the appropriate studies and to educate both young men andfemales for teachers, in a department adopted to that subject. —From a March 3, 1865 letter to 30 citizens of Worcester, Massachusetts

Hence was established, from its founding, WPI’s mission to produce graduates prepared for much more than to practice “the art of directing the great sources of power for the use and convenience of man,” per an early definition of engineering [2]. Through close supervision of their individual work by faculty deeply devoted to their full development as productive young adults, students of “Worcester Tech” were the beneficiaries of a type of mentorship that produced a maturity of outlook, an appreciation for the value and fruits of “smart” and hard work, and what proved to be just the right preparation for leadership in the rising manufacturing industries of central Massachusetts in the century following the founding of this, the nation’s third oldest technological university. 4.2 THE WPI PLAN The legacy of this first 100 years of WPI’s distinctive approach to engineering and science education provided the context and substance for a radical reconsideration of its curriculum during the turbulent years of the late 1960s. The Golden Age of manufacturing in central Massachusetts was drawing to a close with the relocation of home offices, if not entire operations, of many of the nation’s premier corporations from Worcester to other regions of the country with lower costs of labor. The Viet Nam war was weighing heavily on the American psyche, and campuses across the country were in turmoil. WPI sensed both a need and an opportunity for a renewal of mission, purpose, and value in the education it was providing. The Soviet Union’s launch of the satellite Sputnik in 1957 had shocked the United States into realizing that its international lead in science and discovery was slipping rapidly. The resulting investment in the revitalization

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of mathematics and science education swelled the ranks of traditional programs, even as they were being updated and reformed along largely conventional lines. Under the leadership of then-president Harry Purnell Storke, WPI reflected again on its distinctive heritage, as captured by author Mildred McClary Tymeson in her centennial volume, Two Towers: By the time of its Centennial observance [in 1965], the school had long been acknowledged a college of engineering and science . . . [but] at some edge of its educational program, the Institute has always maintained contact with the real work of the world. The school has prospered and languished according to the proportionate strength of this contact, and the steam of endless controversy produced by it has generated unbelievable energy for the professors. [1,p. 235]

This “steam of endless controversy” flowed in substantial amounts as the WPI faculty contemplated the next leap of both faith and innovation for its curriculum. The leap turned out, once again, to vault WPI well ahead of its time as the faculty focused on the question of outputs—how its graduates could demonstrate not only what they had learned but also, and more importantly, the value and purpose of that knowledge, and how to put it to work. This was a radical departure from the dominant focus at most colleges on inputs—scores on standardized entrance examinations (SAT, ACT), course grades and cumulative grade point averages, rank in class, and scores on GRE’s, LSAT’s, MCAT’s, and the like. The fundamental component of the WPI education was to become the project, in which students would work in teams to acquire and apply the knowledge required to solve a series of challenging problems. Students would demonstrate their mastery of the relevant scientific and engineering principles and their applications in both written and oral presentations of the results of their projects, and by passing daunting “competency examinations” administered to students individually by teams of faculty just prior to graduation. Courses would continue to be taught, but were no longer the stepping-stones to degrees. Rather, not unlike the library and the extensive availability of faculty for tutoring and advising, academic courses were regarded simply as set of resources for learning. The responsibility for learning was squarely on the student, not the teacher; the projects—with their practical requirements for teamwork, integration of knowledge, dealing with unscripted challenge, and goal orientation—provided a domain for a much higher order of learning than simple mastery of course content; and the faculty would now assume the roles of tutor, coach, mentor, and examiner to a much greater extent than simply that of lecturer.

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These were the philosophical elements of what was to become known as “The WPI Plan,” which was (narrowly) adopted by the WPI faculty in 1970, and which has been further developed, modified, and extended almost continually in the ensuing 40 years. 4.3 THE QUALIFYING PROJECTS The three major projects required for degrees, aptly named “qualifying” projects, best reflected the new educational philosophy. Of these three, the “Interactive Qualifying Project,” or the “IQP,” stood at the heart of the new approach, and was the most radical departure from the traditional engineering curriculum. At the same time, it was and remains the best exemplar of the “holistic” approach of the WPI Plan. The IQP is undertaken at the intersection of technology and society, and involves the use of technological knowledge to solve a problem of societal importance. The problems are inherently interdisciplinary, complex, and important. Student teams, typically with four members, attack a problem that has been formulated in conjunction with a faculty advisor and researched in advance of the actual project work. Once on site, the team works to clarify the problem and the associated constraints, formulate a proposed solution, identify necessary resources, develop a work plan, set a schedule, collaborate on the implementation, meet the project deadline, and communicate the results both orally and in a written project report. Here, in the IQP, one finds the complete educational philosophy of the WPI Plan. The IQP is typically completed in the junior year, by which time students have mastered core knowledge in the fields related to their major and they have had experience working in teams on projects within various of their courses. They now come together across disciplines, with project teams involving students from different majors, to collaborate in the application of what they know—and what they need quickly to learn—to draw on their own and each other’s abilities to integrate, synthesize, and apply their intellectual abilities, work ethics, and innovative instincts to accomplish a result that creates value in the form of a result that makes a piece of society better for their efforts. During the third and fourth decades of the WPI Plan’s existence it has become increasingly common for these IQP projects to be undertaken at one of WPI’s many off-campus project sites, both across the United States and literally around the world. Indeed, the Institute has formalized what it calls the “Global Perspective Program,” within its Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division, to support the majority of IQP projects that are completed off campus, with approximately half of

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all IQP projects now being completed at more than 20 international WPI project sites. The experiences of students who complete IQP projects at international projects sites are quite different, and we believe much richer, than the more traditional study-abroad programs are able to provide. Whether working to mitigate the effect of motorized vessels on the canals of Venice, creating a capability for the simple washing of clothing in a shanty village outside Capetown, South Africa, or developing an irrigation system for farmers in rural Thailand, students on WPI’s IQP project teams experience the cultural, social, economic, and language differences and similarities between themselves and individuals living in very different contexts in the world. Not surprisingly, the frequent result of these experiences is not only a technological achievement but also a deep and rewarding dive into many aspects of the world’s great diversity, assets, and challenges. One key to the success of the IQP projects, especially those done abroad, is WPI’s unique academic calendar in which the academic year is organized into four 7-week “terms.” The nominal course load is three courses per term. This relatively smaller number of courses per term allows them to be taught more intensely over a briefer period than in the traditional semester (a feature very popular with students) and greatly facilitates the off-site projects, for which students are away from the campus for shorter periods than is the case for more traditional “study abroad” programs.

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The “Major Qualifying Project,” or “MQP,” is not entirely unlike capstone projects required of college seniors in their major field of concentration. The MQP is distinguished by the fact that it is commonly done in teams, and quite often with the sponsorship of, and in collaboration with, a corporate partner. A typical approach is for a faculty advisor, who maintains a research relationship with a corporate sponsor, to collaborate with that sponsor to identify a problem suitable for completion by a project team devoting, as is the case with the IQP project, the equivalent of one-quarter of an entire academic year of work (i.e., the equivalent of three academic courses). Unlike the IQP, which is typically completed in a single 7- or 8week “term,” work on MQP projects is often spread over larger portions of the senior year. In its work to transform the teaching of engineering and science, the WPI faculty brought the same philosophy to the role of the humanities and arts in the WPI curriculum. The original notion, which persisted for 35 years, was that students would complete a qualifying project in this part of the curriculum as well, but one of a considerably different nature. Here the idea was to encourage students to experience the different modes of learning in the various areas of the humanities and arts by enrolling in a set of five thematically related courses, which may or may not involve scientific or technological aspects, and then writing a major paper, called the “Sufficiency Project,” to demonstrate mastery of the related subject matter and to offer a novel perspective, integrating and synthesizing what they had learned in the experience of these courses and related academic work.

THE GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS

45

The Sufficiency Project requirement produced many highly original, creative, and truly remarkable papers, and was a point of great pride for many WPI students. With enrollments growing, however, and each Sufficiency Project having to be individually advised, the burden on the humanities and arts faculty could not be sustained. Recently, the requirement was modified to replace the individually advised “projects” with a set of “inquiry seminars,” the themes of which are announced in advance and in which enrollment is limited to approximately a dozen students per seminar. While this change has reduced the variety of “culminating experiences” to the humanities and arts requirement, it has added the quality of collaborative consideration of interdisciplinary themes. And, as has always been the case, there remain the options for students to complete the humanities and arts requirement either by completing a project in the performing arts (primarily in the Theatre Arts Program) or by concentrating all coursework in a single foreign language (currently Spanish or German). Reference is now to the Humanities and Arts Requirement rather than the Sufficiency Project. Until recently, these three major collaborative requirements—the IQP, the MQP, and the Humanities and Arts Requirement—comprised the major distinctive elements of the WPI Plan and the primary means by which the WPI Plan promotes a deeply “holistic” approach to undergraduate education, by which we mean the attention paid to all aspects of human development, not just the mastery of certain subject matter. To these curriculum components WPI also adds a strong cocurricular program of student leadership development, a residential life program supportive of and integrated with the academic programs, a comprehensive wellness program, and a mandatory physical education requirement. Our Division III varsity athletics program fields highly competitive teams which are coached by professional as dedicated to the development of student athletes as whole individuals as are the member of the faculty and academic support staff. 4.4 THE GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS The most recent development within the WPI Plan, and one that speaks directly both to the holistic approach to student development and to the power of the WPI educational philosophy has been the introduction of the Great Problems Seminars (GPS) for first-year students. The GPS program was born of the conviction that the outstandingly gifted students who enter WPI ought to be confronted, immediately upon their arrival, with both the great challenges facing their generation and the enormous potential that they themselves have for making positive impacts on these problems. A related goal was to add to the

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first year some experience working on projects and in project teams, which is the feature for which many students chose to enroll at WPI, rather than have the first year remain entirely devoted to basic coursework in science, mathematics, and the liberal arts. In a great flourish of educational innovation, the WPI faculty developed a set of four Great Problem Seminars, with titles fully descriptive of both the subject matter and the attitude in which the work would proceed: Healing the World, Feeding the World, Powering the World, and Grand Challenges. Typical of the creative and collaborative nature of the WPI faculty, the seminars are taught by interdisciplinary teams of faculty; students are organized into teams which complete projects under the general theme of the seminars. Students meet regularly both for common lectures and in smaller discussion sections; and the work of the projects involves both archival research and fieldwork. The two-term seminars culminate in presentations of project results by posters and in oral and written reports. It has been my personal observation that the quality of the poster presentations by these GPS freshmen are fully competitive with the presentations made by our IQP and MQP teams, and by many of our graduate students. In the GPS program, we have witnessed the confirmation of the great creative potential of our entering students, and celebrating again the next innovative step in the continuing evolution of the WPI Plan. 4.5 ON GRADES, DEAN’S LISTS, COMPETITION, AND COOPERATION Along with the formal transformation of the curriculum, the WPI Plan introduced a new attitude toward the assessment of students’ work and the purpose of course and project grades. The goal was for achievement at a high level by all students, not a weeding out process or the inordinate acclaim of nominal high achievers. Accordingly, evaluation of student work on the qualifying projects initially resulted only in a pass or a “not yet passing” outcome. Later, to encourage achievement at the highest possible level, the “pass with distinction” was added. Over the years, as various aspects of convention found their way into the WPI Plan, these results evolved into the present grading system of awarding only the letter grades A, B, C, and NR, the final (NR, standing for “no record”) indicating only that the course was not completed with a passing grade. The innovative use of the NR grade, reported to the student at the end of the term but not made part of the permanent record, was intended to encourage students to attempt difficult courses outside their “comfort zone.” Similarly,

THE HOLISTIC CONTINUUM

47

the calculation of grade point averages was abandoned, so as to eliminate the incentive to “game” the grading system, and a Dean’s list was not maintained until quite recently. Although these last two features make the evaluation of applications for graduate study by WPI students more difficult for some institutions to understand and evaluate (a difficulty overcome by the great willingness of WPI faculty advisors to write well-informed, extensive letters of recommendation), a great salutary effect was to deemphasize competition among students and instead to encourage cooperation. Indeed, WPI students carry such pride in this spirit of cooperation over competition that they strongly resisted a recent move by some faculty members to introduce the use of plus and minus modifiers to grades, specifically the Bþ and A  grades common on almost all college campuses. 4.6 THE HOLISTIC CONTINUUM In the 40 years of continuing development of the WPI Plan, the Institute has arrived at a model for higher education that is ideally suited for the needs of an economy that has progressed from agrarian to industrial to information and, now, to innovation [3]. The WPI student, through traditional coursework enhanced by varying degrees of project-based work, gains the core knowledge common to undergraduates in high-quality programs centered on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In parallel with this more common aspect of the curriculum, the WPI student is also engaged in a continuum of integrative experiences that requires deeper and broader intellectual ambition, a more active engagement with knowledge, and a developing ability to set and update goals for personal achievement. This continuum proceeds . . .

.

from the first-year Great Problems Seminars; to the Inquiry Seminars of the sophomore year, which “cap” the coursework in the humanities, arts, and social sciences; to the Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP), typically completed in the junior year, focusing on work at the intersection of technology and society; and finally to The Major Qualifying Project (MQP) of the senior year, integrating what has been learned in the major and related fields to the solution of a significant problem in the field, quite often on the site of, and under sponsorship from, a partner corporation.

The continuum is further enhanced by the Global Perspective Program, which provides opportunities at domestic and international project sites for the

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majority of IQP projects, and also for the humanities and arts requirement (in London, for example, working at the Dickens Museum, or studying Islamic history and culture in Morocco) and for various MQP projects (including project centers in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the financial district of London). And providing immersion in foreign cultures, these global opportunities provide valuable experience in both project management in unfamiliar settings and coordinating work across widely distributed locations. Finally, WPI faculty are working to further enhance the coherence and relevance of the WPI Plan by focusing on the roles of entrepreneurship and innovation in the preparation of graduates for rapidly evolving challenges of the national and global economies. Courses, course components, and a formal minor in entrepreneurship are available to all students, and are being integrated formally into many degree programs. More generally, the habits of mind associated with entrepreneurial and innovative approaches to challenges and opportunities of all types are becoming characteristic of the WPI approach to putting knowledge to work in unlimited and wonderful ways (Figures 4.1 and 4.2).

4.7 A FRAMEWORK FOR CONTINUING DEVELOPMENT During the nearly four decades that have elapsed since the WPI Plan was created it has, not surprisingly, been modified and improved in light of the experience with it. Nonetheless, the fundamental philosophy of the WPI Plan has remained firmly intact. It is remarkable how well aligned the 1970 conception of the WPI Plan anticipated the vision embodied in ABET’s Curriculum 2000 and, more recently, the NAE’s vision for the engineer of 2020 [4,5], placing “people skills” on par with technical skills and core scientific knowledge. This common vision is articulated explicitly in WPI’s current educational philosophy: The goals of the undergraduate program are to lead students to develop an excellent grasp of fundamental concepts in their principal areas of study; to lay a foundation for lifelong renewal of knowledge; to gain a mature understanding of themselves; and, most importantly, to form a deep appreciation of the interrelationships among basic knowledge, technological advance, and human need. [6]

Realizing that the higher education community has begun demanding more of itself in terms of the formulation of learning outcomes and the assessment of student learning, and to ensure its continuing success in

A FRAMEWORK FOR CONTINUING DEVELOPMENT

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WPI Academic Requirements General Education 4 Units

Academic Major 10 Units

Great Problem Seminars Humanities and Arts Inquiry sem. Social Sciences Physical Ed Any course taught at WPI

Junior Project (IQP)

Free Electives 1Unit

Mathematic and Basic Sciences (as required by ABET)

Engineering Science ad Design (as required by ABET)

Solidlines show major project experiences. The dashed line designates the Great Problem Seminars which usually bridge humanities and the sciences

Senior Project (MQP)

4 Units = 1 Year

The academic requirements are stated in Units, equal to one quarter of academic work. The requirement consists of three major components: • General Education includes two units of humanities and arts, two–third units social sciences, one–third unit physical education, and a one unit junior project (the IQP). • The Major consists often units, including a year of mathematics and sciences and a year and a half of engineering science and design, including a one unit senior project (the MQP). • One unit of free electives. The IQP & MQP are major projects usually conducted in teams and often done off campus

FIGURE 4.1 WPI academic requirements.

further developing the WPI Plan, the WPI faculty took the time to reflect on the principles and values that have guided and evolution of the WPI Plan thus far. The result of these deliberations was the formulation of the following learning outcomes, which now serve as touchstones for their continuing work.

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The WPI Academic Calendar

Course 3

Course 2

Spring Mid January

Course 1

Fall Late August

Break—mid October

Off-Campus one-term project

Break—early March

Mid December

Course 9

Course 8

Course 7

Course 6

Course 5

Course 4

Seven week terms

Late April

The academic year is divided into four 7–week long terms. In each term the students generally enrol in three intensive courses. The major projects, the IQP and the MQP, require one term of work. The projects can be spread over several terms and taken along with regular courses or they can be completed in one term, as shown above. This isusually the case for off-campus projects.

FIGURE 4.2 WPI’s academic calendar.

WPI’s Undergraduate Learning Outcomes specify that graduates of WPI will: (1) have a base of knowledge in mathematics, science, and humanistic studies; (2) have mastered fundamental concepts and methods in their principal areas of study; (3) understand and employ current technological tools; (4) be effective in oral, written, and visual communication; (5) function effectively both individually and in teams; (6) Be able to identify, analyze, and solve problems creatively through sustained critical investigation; (7) Be able to make connections between disciplines and to integrate information from multiple sources; (8) Be aware of how their decisions affect and are affected by other individuals separated by time, space, and culture;

REFERENCES

51

(9) Be aware of personal, societal, and professional ethical standards; and (10) Have the skills, diligence, and commitment to excellence needed to engage in lifelong learning. The various aspects of the WPI curriculum are discussed in depth in this book. The projects are, in particular, examined in Chapters 5–8 and in the last chapter the many lessons that the faculty have learned are reviewed. Because the WPI program is unconventional it often seems confusing and hard to understand to those not familiar with it. Figures 4.1 and 4.2 are intended to assist the reader of this and other chapters of the book. The WPI academic year is shown in Figure 4.1, where it is assumed that student is off campus for the January to March term. Figure 4.2 is an overview of the WPI academic requirements, for a student receiving a BS degree in engineering. 4.8 SUMMARY The result of the introduction of the WPI Plan in 1970, together with all of the ensuing modifications, has been a learning environment emphasizing cooperation and collaboration among students and faculty; students’ ability to work collaboratively in teams, to deal with ambiguity, and to integrate knowledge across disciplines; and the application of knowledge to productive, important ends. The plan has been enhanced by the addition of a comprehensive Global Perspective Program, providing unusual opportunities for meaningful work in foreign project sites, and it has been further enriched by a pervasive spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. Of necessity, this environment has required a more active approach to mastering the “core knowledge” needed in the analysis and solution of problems, as well the development of strong interpersonal, writing, and presentation skills. It is truly a rich, comprehensive example of the best of what is meant by the term “holistic education” [7,8]. REFERENCES 1. M.M. Tymeson, Two Towers: The Story of Worcester Tech 1865–1965, Worcester, MA: Polytechnic Institute, 1965, Available: http://www.wpi.edu/academics/ Library/Archives/TwoTowers/. 2. T. Tredgold, 1818, in charter of Institute of Civil Engineering in Great Britain, as cited in [1]. 3. C. Carlson and W. Wilmot, Innovation: The Five Disciplines for Creating What Customers Want. New York: Crown Business, 2006.

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4. National Academy of Engineering, The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2004. 5. National Academy of Engineering, Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005. 6. Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “About the University: Mission and Goals,” Endorsed 1987. Available 2009: http://www.wpi.edu/about/statements.html. 7. D. Grasso and D. Martinelli, “Holistic Engineering,” The Chronicle Review, March 16, 2007. 8. D. Grasso and M. B. Burkins (eds.), Holistic Engineering Education: Beyond Technology. New York: Springer, 2010.

PART II

EFFECTIVE PRACTICES

CHAPTER 5

IGNITION: THE GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS ARTHUR C. HEINRICHER and KRISTIN WOBBE

5.1 INTRODUCTION Educational innovation has been a topical subject for many decades, and much has been discussed so far regarding the WPI Plan, which was first conceived in the late 1960s and put into practice in the 1970s. But not everything in the current WPI program was born 40 years ago; the Plan has evolved and changed over the past 40 years. This particular chapter is about the most recent step in the evolution of the WPI Plan. The strength of the Plan has been and remains to be its focus on project works in the junior (the IQP) and senior (the MQP) years. This focus on project work at the upper levels changes the way that students think about their educational goals. The Plan places student responsibility for learning and teamwork at the heart of their education. While this focus has changed the way that courses are taught in the final years of study, many and perhaps most courses available to students in the first year remained quite traditional. The first-year curriculum has been based on the theory that students needed to “cover” the basics before they could begin the practice in project work. The first year at WPI was still dominated by what some have called “just-incase learning” [1]. This changed in 2007 when the WPI faculty piloted new options for firstyear students defined by the most important challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century. The “Great Problems Seminars” (GPS) are learning experiences that focus on real problems and in this they differ from the introductory courses that cover disciplinary content. The Great Problems Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

55

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IGNITION: THE GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS

Seminars are defined not by discipline or department but by the important problems they tackle. Four different Great Problems Seminars1 have been offered at WPI, with more than 450 students participating in the first three years of the program. The first four themes were as follows: . . . .

Feed the World (all about food) Power the World (all about energy) Heal the World (all about disease) Grand Challenges (all about all of the above . . . and more)

Each theme has been developed and delivered by a pair of faculty from very different disciplines, one from science or engineering and one from humanities or management. It is important to note that the “nonengineer” or “nonscientist” is an equal partner in the teaching pair; the clear message of which is that technical knowledge alone will never adequately address society’s most pressing problems. The first half of each course is devoted to an exploration of various dimensions of the problem: its history, scale, and depth. In the second half of the course, students form teams and focus on a major project of their choice exploring some aspects or possible solutions to the problem. The students choose a project that they really care about. We had high expectations for the Great Problems Seminars, hoping that they could address important learning goals in the first year and make a significant impact on student engagement. Early assessment has shown that the seminars achieved and exceeded the key goals we set for them, but they went a lot further than that and have had positive impacts in areas of student learning and growth that we had not hoped for or imagined. The faculty members involved in the seminars have described this very high level of student engagement as empowerment. Students and faculty have commented on a growth in student capacity for leadership that we did not include in the design. Students have explained that the opportunity to work on a significant project in the first year, without the high stakes associated with the major projects in the junior and senior year, has greatly increased their confidence in their own abilities. The quality of student work has exceeded expectations, eliminating initial concerns that first-year students would not have the background sufficient to begin realistic work on any of the problems.

1

The pilot was supported by a generous gift from the Eric Hahn Family Foundation.

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57

One first-year student captured the experience of the Great Problems Seminars very well, “It is what happens in REAL LIFE . . . there is no substitute.”

5.2 BACKGROUND: THE GAP TO BRIDGE Almost 40 years ago, WPI completely restructured its curriculum to incorporate significant project work, not only within the major but also exploring problems at the intersection of science and engineering with societal needs. At that time, the WPI Plan elaborated not only a creative, adventurous, demanding program in terms of what students would do but also in terms of the curriculum they would cover. Prospective students are attracted to WPI by the excitement and challenge of project work. They hear about the work that WPI students complete in their major (see Chapter 10). They read about students traveling around the world to work on real problems for external sponsors (see Chapter 9 and [2]). Until 2007, they arrived on campus to find themselves in fairly traditional classes designed to cover fundamental math, science, and engineering in a fairly traditional way. The Plan had largely passed over the first year. One WPI faculty task force decried the “relative passivity” of first-year coursework. While the first year was definitely challenging for many students, it was not engaging. First-year courses were at best a pill that had to be swallowed and at worst a barrier that blocked the path to exciting learning. While WPI faculty and students felt the disconnection between the firstyear experience and the excitement of project work, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) provided a quantitative measure of the gap. (See [3] and [4] for background on the survey and [5] for information on WPI’s experience.) First-year students at WPI reported that they were less academically engaged than similar students at peer institutions. WPI’s NSSE composite score for Level of Academic Challenge in the first year was below the same score for WPI’s peer group in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2006 (no data for 2004 and 2005). The same composite score for the senior year was well above the peer scores for the same period. First-year students at WPI reported working less outside of class than students at peer institutions, with less experience in writing than first-year students at peer institutions. Once again, the statistics are reversed in the senior year, with WPI seniors reporting working more hours and having significantly more experience in writing than students at peer institutions. These results quantified the gap between the first-year experience and the WPI’s fundamental mission. We had set high expectations and failed to achieve them. While faculty and staff at WPI had been concerned about the

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first-year experience for almost 10 years and had piloted and institutionalized several important initiatives, the gap remained.

5.3 BACKGROUND: A WIDER VIEW The focus on the first year as critical to both attracting and retaining engineering majors is neither new nor special to WPI. In the 1990s the NSF-sponsored Engineering Educations Coalitions [6,7] brought together 44 colleges and universities in six regions to spark fundamental changes in engineering education. For example, Drexel University designed a highly integrated first-year curriculum for engineering students [8,9]. Hagenberger et al. [10] describe a similar program at Valparaiso University. See [11] for the description of a first-year course at Wright State University that introduces key mathematical models for engineering applications before students have the complete mathematical background needed to derive or to analyze the models. WPI also has done work to use project work to bridge introductory courses [12–14]. Even with this list of innovations, most faculty members would say that engineering education in the first year has not changed much in 40 years. Most reform efforts have treated existing courses as given, and existing disciplines as sacred. Innovations that worked well for small groups or with external funding were not scalable or sustainable when the funding went away. For example, some faculty members who participated in the Engineering Education Coalitions have said that the programs have not brought about the substantial and sought-after changes to the engineering education at WPI [15]. In 1997, the Olin Foundation made a strong statement when it decided not to support incremental changes in existing engineering programs but instead to fund the creation of the completely new Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. The Olin curriculum was built from the ground up, with a design experience in the first semester and project work as a significant and increasing fraction of each academic year, and with an emphasis on entrepreneurship [16,17]. The National Academy of Engineering is working to change the image of engineering, both as a profession and an educational endeavor, by focusing on the most important problems facing humanity in the twenty-first century, with the development of the Grand Challenges2 (as well as the Grand Challenges Scholars) Program. The National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenge Scholars program is a combined curricular and extracurricular program with five components that are designed to prepare students to be the generation that 2

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/ and http://www.grandchallengescholars.org/.

BACKGROUND: A WIDER VIEW

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solves the grand challenges facing society in this century. The five components of the Grand Challenge Scholars Program include the following: research experience; interdisciplinary curriculum; entrepreneurship; global dimension; and service learning. The focus on the first year in college as a critical transition point has become a national priority, for many years, and not just in science and engineering. The National Resource Center for the First-Year ExperienceÒ and Students in Transition3 organized its 22nd International Conference on the first-year experience in 2009. The center is a rich source of research on the first-year experience movement, but a great deal of this research focuses on programs that prepare students for college [18–20]. The problems they address are huge: too many students finish high school without the basic study skills or fundamental knowledge necessary for success in college. Faculty and staff from the University of South Carolina presented a workshop in 2008 on their First-Year Seminar programs. Twenty years of hard work have provided valuable lessons and helped faculty and staff at the University of South Carolina develop a highly successful program. The FY seminars are not required, but the university still has better than 80% participation from the first-year students. It is interesting to note that when asked who were the students that chose not to participate, the FY faculty and staff pointed to the “science and engineering majors.” One implication of this is that a school that focuses almost entirely on science and engineering needs a different kind of the first-year seminar. There are many other examples of successful first-year programs in nonengineering areas. For example, two other colleges in Massachusetts have innovative first-year programs organized around research themes, with an optional yearlong “Diving into Research” course.4 The College of the Holy Cross has had an interdisciplinary first-year seminar series with a new theme each year5 since 1992. (The Holy Cross program was expanded to serve the entire first-year class in 2006.) Another example of a successful first-year program is the College of Arts and Sciences Core Curriculum at Boston University.6 The focus at BU is on raising the enduring questions of a liberal arts education, which is the same point of inquiry that led to the creation of the Core Curriculum at Columbia College in 1919 [21].

3 4 5 6

http://sc.edu/fye/. https://www.clarku.edu/classof2013/academics/fys.cfm. http://www.holycross.edu/departments/FYP/website/theme.html. http://www.bu.edu/core.

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5.4 THE GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS: DESIGN CRITERIA The faculty who worked to develop the first Great Problem Seminars kept three design criteria in mind as they worked. The course should: (1) start with a great problem; (2) include a self-selected major project performed by a small group of students; and (3) require more writing and communication than traditional disciplinebased courses. The third criterion places an emphasis on fostering perhaps the most palpably useful skill. Many authors have argued that an increased emphasis on writing as a skill is critical for the engineer of the twenty-first century [22–25]. WPI faculty have found that students are not always well prepared for the level of writing required in major projects in the junior and senior years. NSSE uses student writing as one of the measure of engagement and defines it as an academic challenge of the program. Research in the learning sciences [26] has also shown that students learn best when they articulate their developing understanding. Writing and presenting are valuable professional skills that are also instrumental in deep learning. The second criterion ties the first year experience directly to the goals of the WPI Plan. The emphasis on teamwork (and close work with a project advisor) is the key to the IQP and in many cases to the MQP. This also helps build the academic and social support network that is a component of success in college. The first criterion is by far the most important, and has had the most surprising impacts on WPI students. The focus on the great problem was meant to serve as a point of motivation; it stimulates and channels the work of students. It taps the energy that the first-year students bring to college; they expect the university to be something different from high school. It gives the students a framework to justify all of their other educational efforts. Because of this, students in the GPS have not asked and are not likely to ask their instructors this question, “Why are we studying this?” There is another, surprising effect of this educational initiative. The students have less fear of failure at this level and in these seminars and are more willing to take risks. The GPS project does not carry the same weight as the IQP and MQP (both being graduation requirements). The students have not had all of the background courses in the theory needed to find a solution. They are able to learn as they go, capturing what they need to learn to make progress on the project, and realizing why the disciplinary courses in mathematics, chemistry, physics, economics, history, and rhetoric could be useful to them in the end.

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5.5 GREAT PROBLEMS SEMINARS: THE CURRICULUM DETAILS The Great Problems Seminars do not replace any existing course, but they do require some space in the curriculum, one sixth of a WPI student’s first year to be exact. Each of the GPS is equal to two courses, with an elective credit in an appropriate department (in the early stages, we needed a way to fit this square peg into a round distribution requirement hole). The seminars, in other words, were structured very differently from typical WPI courses (Table 5.1). The most important part of each GPS is the major project. However, before we set first-year students on that course, the students need some guidance and preparation. In the first half of the course substantial time is given to presenting the problem(s) to students from multiple perspectives, requiring reading, writing, problem solving, and frequent presentations. The readings come from nontraditional sources; everything from Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle to McDonough and Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle, with articles from The Economist, Scientific American, and the Boston Globe thrown in to keep the discussion current and relevant (See [27–31].). The faculty has identified a few key components in the structure of the GPS: the kick-off lecture, the faculty team, the adventure assignments, and the major project. 5.5.1 The Kick-Off Lecture We initiate the Great Problems Seminars with a kick-off lecture by a prominent individual working on one of the great problems of the seminars. All students enrolled in any of the GPS courses are expected to attend, and the greater campus community is also invited. This lecture provides a broad perspective on the problem for the students, and in addition, shows them that these are indeed significant problems that have become the life work of highly regarded and talented individuals. The speakers have also visited the GPS classroom and had discussions with small groups of students. Alfred W. Crosby, the inaugural speaker, a highly respected historian and author TABLE 5.1 Special Features of the GPS 1. Seminar is twice as long as a typical course (14 versus 7 weeks) 2. Seminar is led by two instructors from different departments 3. Students receive the equivalent of two courses of credit 4. The credit is given in two different disciplinary areas 5. Second half of the seminar devoted primarily to project work

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of one of the required texts for Power the World, Children of the Sun [32], met with students in Power the World on their first day of class. The students pressed Professor Crosby to give them “the answer” to the world’s future energy needs. He responded with a smile, saying “I’m an historian. The future is your problem!” This exchange set the tone for the entire course. Doctor David Ho, a key scientist on the team that developed the triple drug cocktail that is still the standard treatment for AIDS, gave the second kick-off lecture on the state of HIV/AIDS research. His presentation blended the challenges facing researchers as well as policy makers and described the passion that drives his work. Doctor Ho also spent most of the day meeting with small groups of first-year students. More than one student was moved by the fact that a world-famous researcher would spend time talking with them (and not at them). 5.5.2 The Faculty Team We have found that the students appreciate having both faculty members present during at least part of the course. They enjoy the dialog between the faculty, and this dialog provides an example of intellectual discourse that is otherwise unavailable in a typical lecture course. We also realized that the faculty team models another very important behavior when leading a discussion in an area where neither instructor is an expert. The faculty members approach the great problems as learners and take a very public risk in stepping out before a class not as experts but as intelligent investigators struggling to make sense of an important problem. The students are asked to take the same kind of risk in their learning. 5.5.3 Adventure Assignments Some assignments in the first term involved experiential learning in a group setting. For example, in Feed the World, the students were each required to spend an hour in the dish line at the student dining hall, collecting and weighing all the food (solid and liquid) that was uneaten. After two full days of collecting wasted food, the data were aggregated and presented in a class discussion. The students were then required to write and send a letter to some stakeholder in the dining process (food service, campus newspaper, student government, administration) that detailed the findings and suggested some remedy. In Heal the World, the students participated in simulated epidemics, modeling the black plague and cholera in the Middle Ages. Students in their role as traveling merchants or pilgrims were required to write postcards to friends and family back home detailing their experience. These assignments proved to have a much larger impact on the student understanding and

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appreciation of the situation than if they had simply studied the public health statistics. 5.5.4 The Major Project The major objective of the course is to complete a team project that occupies students in the second half of the course. Students work with the faculty advisor to arrive at a suitable project topic and design. In this process, faculty members serve in an advisory capacity only—allowing student choices and decisions to lead them to greater ownership of the project. First-year students frequently need assistance in paring a topic down to a manageable slice. For instance, initial ideas for the project might be “depletion of fish stocks.” Discussion with faculty will help students to arrive at a more manageable topic such as “Depletion of fish stocks in Lake Victoria, Africa.” In addition, FY students frequently need reminding that they are to provide a workable solution rather than settle on the problem description. The following are a few of the project titles from each of the seminars:7 Feed the World . . . . .

Preventing fertilizer run-off Method for preserving fishery yield in Chesapeake Bay Food stamp participation in Worcester Polyculture: an approach to sustainable farming What’s for lunch?

Power the World . . . . .

Combating misconceptions about nuclear power Feasibility study of photovoltaic systems at WPI The cost of green roofs versus conventional tar roofs Consumer’s guide to wind turbines in Massachusetts Feasibility of geothermal power production in the US

Heal the World . . . . . 7

Noncompliance of tuberculosis treatment in India Preventing HIV and HPV: are the youth informed? Fight the cancer, not the treatment Inefficient delivery of health care Lassa virus prevention in West Africa

Posters for all of the GPS projects are available on the WPI web site at www.wpi.edu/þFYE.

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Grand Challenges . . . . .

Malewa, Kenya—Clean Water Project Organic Waste Management at WPI Point Source Power Generation Using a Sterling Engine Remaking Recycling Bottle to Bottle

Once a suitable topic is developed, the team begins collecting data, formulating a problem statement, and looking for viable solutions. During this process, the project teams meet at least once a week with the faculty to discuss progress, team issues, and current development of the ideas. In some courses, the students are required to give preliminary presentations to the class on their research development and get feedback from both the faculty and their peers. All the seminars require as the final products of this work a written project report and a poster. Some seminars also require a formal presentation and/or development of some promotional material designed to persuade and inform a target audience. Global issues that the seminars raise can also serve as a launching pad for students’ academic and professional ambitions. Many students arrive at college with a nebulous desire to better the world. These courses can focus that desire, showing first-year students where their soon-to-be-gained skills can be put to great use. We have had students report to us that they are galvanized to make a difference and that the seminars have clarified to them where to best apply themselves toward this end: For the class project, my group was able to work with a non-government organization to develop a sustainable soap making and distribution process for the city of Malewa, Kenya. This project was a great opportunity; I have realized from this course that I want to work for non-government organizations to develop and introduce sustainable processes that will better the lives of those less privileged.

Other students have continued with their project after the course was over, hoping to bring their concept to fruition. For example, one group in the Grand Challenges seminar worked with a NGO to develop ideas for helping Malewa, Kenya, to solve the problem of limited clean water. At the end of the course, the team was making plans to fly to Africa, to see if they could participate in the implementation of the plan they had developed. Another group, in the Feed the World seminar, contacted the City of Worcester about expanding the Meals on Wheels program to individuals below the age of 65, because there is significant need for those among people who are not very mobile.

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The culminating event of the course is a single large poster presentation for all the students in all the seminars. The whole of WPI community and the larger community beyond its walls are invited to attend. The posters are judged, and for each seminar a winner and a runner-up are selected. While the prizes are appreciated, the students are more excited by the opportunity to show their work, of which they are deservedly proud, to their peers, their other instructors, and to the influential members of both the WPI and larger community. The presentations are judged, which adds an important level of professionalism to the day, but the real purpose is the celebration of student achievements. The students and the audience have been amazed by what the first-year students could accomplish in just one semester at college. 5.6 INITIAL ASSESSMENT Over 110 students enrolled in the 2007 GPS courses (out of a first-year class of about 800 students) and more than 200 enrolled in 2008 (out of a first-year class of about 900 students). Two themes to explore were offered

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TABLE 5.2 Gender Distribution for GPS 2008

Female Male

Feed the World 47.83%

Heal the World 64.44%

52.17%

Grand Challenges

35.56%

Power the World

GPS Students

Class of 2012

24.07%

21.13%

35.23%

29.00%

75.93%

78.87%

64.77%

71.00%

in 2007 and four themes were offered in 2008. The GPS are not required offerings and so interesting patterns emerged among incoming students elected to participate. For example, the distribution for 2008 is given in Table 5.2. First, the percentage of female students in the GPS is slightly larger than their percentage in the Class of 2012, but the distribution is clearly not uniform. In two themes, Grand Challenges and Power the World males are slightly overrepresented. In the other two themes, Feed the World and Heal the World female students are greatly overrepresented relative to the class as a whole. The distribution of majors for the themes also reflects a selection preference by major (Table 5.3). Undecided students are slightly overrepresented in the GPS, perhaps because these students feel free to explore in their first year. Engineers (including Mechanical, Electrical and Computer, Chemical, and Civil and Environmental engineers) are overrepresented in Grand Challenges and Power the World mirroring the gender balance described above. Engineering has lower than expected representation in Feed the World and Heal the World while the Math and Science group (which includes Computer Science, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematical Sciences, Physics, and Biomedical Engineering) is greatly overrepresented in Feed the World and Heal the World, again mirroring the gender balance in Table 5.2. These major distributions are perhaps not totally unexpected due to the credit assigned to these courses. Both Power the World, and Grand Challenges provide credit that aligns well with TABLE 5.3 Major Groups for GPS 2008 Major Group

Feed the Heal the Grand Power the GPS Class of World World World Challenges Students 2012

Engineering

21.74%

6.67%

48.15%

42.25%

33.16%

38%

Math and Science

43.48%

60.00%

12.96%

25.35%

32.12%

29%

HUA & Management Undecided

0.00%

13.33%

7.41%

1.41%

5.70%

8%

34.78%

20.00%

31.48%

30.99%

29.02%

25%

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TABLE 5.4 Student Course Reports AB2008

My overall rating of the quality of this course is My overall rating of the instructor’s teaching is The amount I learned in this course was

University

FTW

PTW

GC

HTW

Mean

4.62 4.95 4.68

4.20 4.36 4.11

4.67 4.55 4.55

4.34 4.45 3.89

4.05 4.05 3.83

the demands of the engineering majors (Physics and Engineering Science, respectively), while Feed the World and Heal the World offer science credits (Chemistry and Biology, respectively). There is also some anecdotal evidence to suggest who elected to leave the seminars at the midpoint, keeping one course credit for the first term. In the first year, the number who elected to drop at the midpoint was small (6.3%). The most common explanations for leaving were the lack of structure (the feeling that students did not know where the course was going), the high workload, and the quantity of required writing. In general, the students who left were not students who had difficulty with the academic work. Indeed, some were the brightest students in the class. The GPS may be more successful at, in the words of Sheila Tobias [33], “stalking the second tier.” It seemed that those who left early were the students who had learned to succeed by a certain set of rules, who were comfortable with this set of rules, and who wished to return to that comfort zone where problems were clear and unambiguous. They used only the tools familiar to them and sought answers in the back of the book to set the standard for their work. GPS faculty participated in the same course evaluations administered in all undergraduate courses. Table 5.4 shows that evaluations for all four themes were well above the university mean for some key questions on the surveys. It is worth noting, that it is generally not unusual for first year courses to score below the university mean. In addition, each of the teaching teams developed assessment tools tailored to their particular course. For example, Feed the World students were asked to rate how much the course helped them to develop a number of skills: writing, speaking, presentation preparation, and teamwork. The results are found in Table 5.5. Getting objective assessment of that improvement is very difficult, but the participating faculty felt that the students, particularly in presentation skills, showed dramatic improvement toward the end of the experience over where they started. Another piece of anecdotal evidence to support the success of the GPS comes from instructors who have had these students in subsequent courses. According to these faculty members, the GPS students are noteworthy

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TABLE 5.5 Self-Reported Skill Development To What Extent has This Class Helped Your Writing skills Speaking skills Presentation preparation skills Teamworking skills

Not at All (%)

Somewhat (%)

Quite a Bit (%)

A Great Deal (%)

0 9 0 0

36 5 14 14

41 36 9 14

23 50 77 73

for their writing, critical thinking ability, asking good questions, and willingness to be class leaders.

5.7 EXTERNAL ASSESSMENT To establish a mechanism for proper assessment of the GPS initiative, WPI developed and implemented an assessment plan in collaboration with the Research & Evaluation Group at the UMass Donahue Institute. The assessment plan included pre- and postsurveys administered to all first-year students in the first year of the pilot, focus group interviews with students and faculty in the spring of 2008 (after the completion of the first year of the program), focus group interviews with students and faculty who participated in the GPS in fall 2008 (completed in the spring of 2009), and one more focus group interview with GPS alumni one year after they had completed the program. In 2007, when Feed the World and Power the World were offered for the first time, pre- and postsurveys were distributed to all first-year students. Compared to non-GPS students, as surveys showed, the GPS students experienced their first year in college with a higher levels (statistically significant difference) of engagement in several important areas, including: . . . .

working effectively in teams; developing a greater understanding of contemporary and global issues; solving complex real-world problems; and presenting and defending opinions by making judgments about information, validity of ideas, or quality of work based on a set of criteria.

5.7.1 Focus Group for GPS 2007: Formative Assessment Focus groups completed in the spring after the first offering of the GPS clearly identified the project work as the most valuable component of the program. Students also expressed some dissatisfaction with the course. While reasons

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for dissatisfaction differed across seminars, issues that were common to both seminars are identified here: . . .

students desired more structure and more cohesiveness than the seminars provided; B-term experiences tended to be more valuable to students than A-term experiences; and students desired more work related to current events.

Thus, in the first year of the program, student expectations and desires did not fully correspond to faculty expectations and approaches.

5.7.2 Focus Group for GPS 2007: One Year Later The assessment consultant followed up with interviews of students from the first year of the GPS to identify the impact of GPS on their second year at WPI. While there was serious criticism of the GPS after the first offering, the consultant reported that there was “not a single negative comment” when the same students were interviewed one year later. To an overwhelming extent, the 2007 GPS alumni believed that GPS did an excellent job at exposing them to the project-intensive environment of WPI, that because of GPS they were perceived as valuable assets by current employers and as very strong candidates by potential employers, and that through GPS they had learned how to do project and group work in better ways than the non-GPS first-year students WPI had. Areas directly related to the goals of GPS that alumni reported as their areas of growth and skill development as a result of their experience in GPS were the following: . . . . .

Project management Teamwork Time management Presentation skills Critical thinking

Alumni believed that developing these skills during their first two terms at WPI through GPS helped prepare them for project work that would take place both at WPI and beyond. It is significant that the GPS alumni credited GPS with having helped them to develop these skills. What is perhaps more noteworthy, though, is that the other skills that alumni developed through their GPS experience, which are not directly related to GPS goals, are skills

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that will underlie both their success in the areas that GPS had intended to influence and their success outside of WPI. The skills that the GPS program was not designed to address but that the alumni believed they developed as a direct result of their participation in the GPS are listed below: . . . .

assuming positions of leadership on a team; accepting critical feedback from others; having confidence to speak with individuals who are in positions of power; and presenting one professionally.

These skills all fall, to a certain extent, under an umbrella of developing personal and professional maturity. It appears as if the GPS served the purpose not only of quickly acclimating the first-year students to the WPI environment of heavy workloads and challenging project work but also the purpose of accelerating their ability to manage these things well. The GPS challenged these individuals to behave as professionals while they were merely first-year students, and while they struggled to do so (and even resented it at times), they not only met the challenge but also emerged with skills that will continue to serve them well during and after their time at WPI. At the end of the focus group, when asked if they had any additional comments about their GPS experience, one student said, “It gives you all the right amount of stress in the right places to make you learn the right way to do the right thing.” 5.7.3 Focus Group for GPS 2008 Similar assessment was conducted after the 2008 offerings of the GPS. The conclusions of this round of assessment were that across the board all offerings succeeded in meeting the goals of the program: they engaged students with current events, societal problems, and human needs; they encouraged students to think critically, become information literate, and produce evidence-based writing; and they challenged students to accept personal responsibility for their learning and to develop teamwork skills, time management skills, and organizational skills. The biggest benefit perceived by all was that students developed significant experience, knowledge and skill in the area of teamwork. Students felt that their participation in GPS allowed them to develop competencies that they would not have developed as first-year students had they not been in GPS, and they believed that these skills would serve them well in their future work both at WPI and beyond.

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The focus groups with students and faculty further supported the following, among other things: .

.

. . .

Students are capable of meeting the significant challenges of project work and of teamwork during their first year when they are instructed in how to approach those challenges. First-year students appreciate being treated as professionals and are capable not only of rising to the challenge but also of thriving as students as a result of it. Mentoring first-year students empowers them to become agents of change. Skills learned by students through the GPS are immediately applicable and beneficial to students outside GPS. GPS is a catalyst for intellectual growth at WPI.

5.7.4 Comments from Students After GPS 2008 Students also had the opportunity to provide feedback on their experiences in the GPS that year—through course evaluations, student reflections, and even essays for campus-wide awards. Some of these comments are included below. It is noteworthy that overwhelmingly the comments on the GPS experience are positive; we could have included significantly more, but this is a reasonable representation of the kinds of remarks the students made about their experiences in the GPS. STUDENT COMMENTS: OPEN-ENDED PROBLEMS I liked that it covered many sides of the same problem, which helped illustrate why there was a problem at all. (PTW) The seminar showed me that real-life problems are not clear-cut; they are not simple; they are multifaceted. Although this adage is something I have been told many times by my parents and teachers, GPS made me truly grasp the concept by fully experiencing it. (GC) I have learned how to evaluate a problem from multiple perspectives. . . Necessary knowledge from textbooks is useful, but knowing how and when to use it is much more important. (HTW) Doing a project like this prepares us for future Sufficiencies, IQPs and MQPs, and leaves us with the skills necessary to succeed with these projects. Now when we encounter a problem or project without any direction, we can feel confident in trusting our own judgment to approach it. This confidence is the most important thing that I’ll take from this course, and something I’ll be able to apply not only to future projects, but also to my employment and life after WPI. (HTW)

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STUDENT COMMENTS: LEADERSHIP We were kind of our own bosses and needed to manage our time accordingly. It also allowed us to research the topic that most interested us. . . . I have taken more away from this class than knowledge alone. (PTW) I also learned some of the basic steps needed to be taken in order to solve complex problems and I had real world experience trying to solve a problem in the Worcester community. It was an eye-opening experience and gave me the confidence that has contributed to my present success in college. (FTW) GPS helped kick start my career by showing me what it is like to work for several months in a group to start and finish a major project. This project will help me throughout my career, not only in my resume, but using what I learned in working with others to build my leadership and team-work skills. (GC)

STUDENT COMMENTS: UNBELIEVABLE There is one thing that I took away from this course that will stay with me way longer than retroviruses or prokaryotes, epidemics and over charging for the AIDS triple cocktail. It is that one person can make a difference in the world . . . And the best thing that this class has taught me is that I have an opportunity to be one of those people. (HTW)

5.8 CONCLUDING REMARKS In his address to the 2004 Summit on Engineering Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, President Charles Vest challenged the participants to remember that “students are driven by passion, curiosity, engagement, and dreams . . .” (quoted in [22]). In WPI’s Great Problems Seminars instructors also tap into another motivation that the students have— to step up their dreams and to work on something real. Experience of the first three years of the Great Problem Seminars convinces us that these driving forces are too strong in students in the first semester of their first year to be ignored. By surrendering, at least temporarily, content in favor of empowerment, we believe that we have provided a better foundation for learning and growth than offered by the traditional disciplinary courses.

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Our major lessons from the GPS experience include the following: (1) Students can do more than we expect in the first year. (2) Adding challenge and increasing engagement in the first year can be achieved by a new type of learning experience that let first-year students work on important problems from the first day of the first year. (3) Do not think about disciplines or traditional courses or material to cover. Think about important problems and let the problem itself demand the disciplinary learning from students. (4) A good project may not arrive at the answer. It may arrive at a better question and the ability of students to ask a better question the next time around. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many faculty members participated in the development of the Great Problems Seminars. Brian Savilonis, David Spanagel, Robert Traver, and Kristin Wobbe were the faculty who created Power the World and Feed the World in 2007. They were supported that year by James Demetry and Svetlana Nikitina, who helped advise student projects and gave additional support in writing and presentation skills. Diran Apelian, Svetlana Nikitina, Jill Rulfs, and Helen Vassalo developed the new seminars in 2008, with added project advising support provided by Fred Looft, Rick Sisson, and Gretar Tryggvason. This is a group of truly committed and incredibly creative teachers and learners. REFERENCES 1. A. Collins and R. Halverson, Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. New York: Teachers College Press, 2009. 2. Worcester Polytechnic Institute. WPI Global Perspective Program, 2010. Available: http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/GPP/index.html. 3. G.D. Kuh, “The National Survey of Student Engagement: Conceptual Framework and Overview of Psychometric Properties.” Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and Planning, 2003. Available: http://nsse.iub.edu/pdf/ conceptual_framework_2003.pdf. 4. National Survey of Student Engagement, “Our Origins and Potential,” 2001. Available: http://nsse.iub.edu/html/origins.cfm. 5. P. Quinn, “Review of Findings from 2002 National Survey of Student Engagement Report for First-Year Students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.”

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Worcester Polytechnic Institute, January 9, 2003. Available: http://www.wpi.edu/ Academics/Outcomes/pqmodexec.pdf. Foundation Coalition, 2008. Available: http://www.foundationcoalition.org. K.C. Frair, M. Cordes, D. Evans and J. Froyd, “The Foundation Coalition— Looking Toward the Future,” paper presented at the 1997 Frontiers in Education Conference, Milwaukee, WI, Oct 10–13, 2007. Available: http://fie-conference. org/fie97/papers/1078.pdf. E. Fromm and R.G. Quinn, “An Experiment to Enhance the Educational Experience of Engineering Students,” Engineering Education, vol. 79, no. 3, pp. 424–429, April 1989. R. Quinn, “Drexel’s E4 Program: A Different Professional Experience for Engineering Students and Faculty,” Journal of Engineering Education, vol. 82, no. 4, 1993. M. Hagenberger, B. Engener and D. Tougaw, “Teaching First-Year Students the Fundamentals of Engineering,” paper presented at ASEE Illinois and Indiana North-Central Conference, 2006. Available: ilin.asee.org/Conference2006 program/Papers/Tougaw-P27.pdf N.W. Klingbeil, R.E. Mercer, K.S. Rattan, M.L. Raymer and D.B. Reynolds, “The WSU Model for Engineering Mathematics Education,” ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, Portland, Oregon, 2005. W.R. Grogan, L.E. Schachterle and F.C. Lutz, “Liberal Learning in Engineering Education: The WPI Experience,” New Directions in Teaching and Learning, vol. 35, pp. 21–37, 1988. A.C. Heinricher, J. Goulet, J.E. Miller, C. Demetry, S.W. Pierson, S. Gurland, V. Crawford, P. Quinn and M.J. Pinnet, “Building Interdisciplinary Bridges Between Math, Science, and Engineering Courses,” Journal for the Art of Teaching, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 56–72, Spring, 2002. Vaz, R.F., “Connected Learning: Interdisciplinary Projects in International Settings,” Liberal Education, vol. 86, no. 1, pp. 24–31, Winter, 2000. J. Froyd, “The Engineering Education Coalitions Program,” in Educating the Engineer of 2020, National Academy of Engineering. Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2005. S.E. Kerns, R.K. Miller and D. V Kerns, “Designing from a Blank Slate: The Development of the Initial Olin College Curriculum,” in Educating the Engineer of 2020, National Academy of Engineering. Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2005. M. Somerville, D. Anderson, H. Berbeco, J.R. Bourne, J. Crisman, D. Dabby, H. Donis-Keller, S.S. Holt, S. Kerns, D.V. Kerns, R. Martello, R. Miller, M. Moody, G. Pratt, J. C. Pratt, C. Shea, S. Schiffman, S. Spence, L.A. Stein, J.D. Stolk, B.D. Storey, B. Tilley, B. Vandiver and Y. Zastavker, “The Olin Curriculum: Thinking Toward the Future,” IEEE Transactions on Education, vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 198–205, 2005.

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18. M.S. Hunter and C.W. Linder, “First-Year Seminars,” in M. L. Upcraft, J.N. Gardner and B.O. Barefoot (eds.), Challenging and Supporting the First-Year Student: A Handbook for Improving the First Year of College. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. 19. University of South Carolina, National Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, 2010. Available: http://www.sc.edu/fye/. 20. M.L. Upcraft, J.N. Gardner and B.O. Barefoot, Challenging and Supporting the First-Year Student: A Handbook for Improving the First Year of College, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006. 21. L. Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reforms and Resistance in the American University. New York: Norton, 2010. 22. National Academy of Engineering, Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2005. 23. D.E. Goldberg, The Entrepreneurial Engineer. New York: Wiley, 2006. 24. R.J. Sternberg, “Interdisciplinary Problem-Based Learning: An Alternative to Traditional Majors and Minors,” Liberal Education, vol. 94, no. 1, pp. 12–17, 2008. 25. G. Tryggvason and D. Apelian, “Re-Engineering Engineering Education for the Challenges of the 21st Century,” JOM Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, vol. 58, no. 10, pp. 14–17, Oct, 2006. 26. R.K. Sawyer, The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 27. B. Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. New York: Harper Collins, 2007. 28. H.D. Leathers and P. Foster, The World Food Problem: Tackling Causes of Undernutrition in the Third World, 3rd edn. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reinner, 2004. 29. W. McDonough and M. Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Thing. New York: North Point Press, 2002. 30. P. Menzel and F. D’Aluisio, Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 2005. 31. M. Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. New York: Penguin, 2006. 32. A.W. Crosby, Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. New York: Norton, 2006. 33. S. Tobias, They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different: Stalking the Second Tier. Tucson, AZ: Research Corporation, 1990.

CHAPTER 6

GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP: STUDENTS SOLVING REAL PROBLEMS AROUND THE WORLD RICHARD F. VAZ, NATALIE A. MELLO, and DAVID DIBIASIO

6.1 INTRODUCTION Our “flattened” world is characterized by change, connectivity, and competition. Increasingly, knowledge is communal, technical skill is a commodity, and engineering obstacles are social rather than technical. Scientists and engineers are facing new challenges, implying the need for significant educational reform. In particular, leaders from academia, industry, and the public sector have issued compelling calls for change in engineering education, arguing that the nation’s competitiveness and standard of living hinges on its ability to educate a generation of engineers ready to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. One component common to these visions of the twenty-first century engineer is global preparedness: the ability to work effectively anywhere in the world, to produce solutions suited to different cultures and contexts, and to communicate effectively with a wide range of audiences. The discussion has moved to include deans and department heads, professional societies, and funding agencies, and many institutions are taking initiatives to respond to the challenge. Unfortunately, engineering students continue to be underrepresented in study abroad, still comprising less than 5% of US students gaining international experience [1]. Few science and engineering programs have been able to make significant progress in providing students with international experiences. The challenge facing technological education is establishment of international programs that are scalable to accommodate many students, and sustainable beyond the first generation of faculty leaders. Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The Global Perspective Program (GPP) at Worcester Polytechnic Institute is proof that international experiences for engineering and science students can be both scalable and sustainable. WPI sends 50% of its students overseas—about 400 students each year—and has operated the program for nearly three decades, with over 7500 students participating, the majority of them engineering students. WPI has sent more engineering students abroad than any college or university in the country, regardless of size. However, the GPP’s primary distinction is not in its scale, but in its educational focus and scope. Rather than attending other universities, WPI students travel around the globe to solve problems for local agencies and organizations under faculty guidance. Combining project-based experiential learning, service learning, undergraduate research, and study abroad, the program is a model of how universities can place high-engagement experiences at the center of the curriculum rather than at its periphery. While enhancing global learning, the program also promotes significant achievement in interdisciplinary problem solving, critical thinking, communication, and teamwork—essential skills for twenty-first century professionals. 6.2 WPI’S PROJECT-BASED CURRICULUM Academic project work is central to the undergraduate curriculum at WPI, and is at the heart of the GPP. Every student must complete three projects: a capstone experience in the Humanities and Arts (usually completed in the second year), a project relating technology to society (the Interactive Qualifying Project or IQP, in the third year), and a design or research project in the major (the Major Qualifying Project or MQP, in the fourth year). These projects are the vehicle for international activity at WPI; students can complete any or all of these three requirements off campus through the GPP. The first project forms the capstone experience for a thematically related sequence in some area of the arts or humanities, generally involving an original research paper or creative work. The other two projects are each equivalent to three courses, and are completed in small teams under faculty supervision, often for external sponsors. Neither takes place in a classroom setting; both involve open-ended inquiry and problem-solving. The interdisciplinary IQP, unique to WPI, helps students understand the social and humanistic contexts of their professions. This degree requirement presents small, multidisciplinary teams of students with a problem involving both technical and societal aspects, challenging them to reflect on the relationship of science and technology to civic issues and community needs. The learning outcomes of the IQP include critical and contextual thinking, persuasive written and oral communication, integration, and synthesis. The MQP is not unlike senior projects at other institutions, except that it is typically more extensive and often involves external

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sponsorship. MQP students must demonstrate application of skills, methods, and knowledge of the discipline to the solution of a real problem in their field. Similar to the IQP, the MQP learning goals are transferrable, focusing on problem-solving, communication, and professional skills. Most engineering institutions require their students to complete a senior thesis, which is the culmination of all they have learned during their education. . . WPI’s project system allows a small team of students to formulate their own project, where they are responsible for product design, but also keeping in mind schedule, cost analysis, and world impact. The project system at WPI is iterative; students are required to complete both an interdisciplinary and design project during their time at WPI, which they can complete at most of the project centers around the world. I completed my senior design project locally in Massachusetts. This project resulted in an extremely time constrained and intense invention that eventually received an award from a national publication. The success of this project relied on our already developed project management skills. The experience I had in Copenhagen, Denmark, the prior year prepared me for this rigorous project, which eventually led to my full-time career at Apple. —Michael Cretella 2007

To accommodate off-campus projects, the WPI academic calendar operates on four 7-week terms per academic year. Students normally take three courses each term. While on-campus projects are often spread over multiple terms and done while the student is also taking other courses, the off-campus projects are always completed full-time in one term, either during the academic year or during a fifth summer term. Table 6.1 illustrates how an off-campus project and its preparation are accommodated within a typical engineering student’s junior year schedule. 6.3 EDUCATIONAL MOTIVATIONS AND IMPLICATIONS The GPP instructional paradigm is based upon the well-established theory of situated learning, which features authentic activities, contexts, and assessments [2,3]. Authentic learning environments place students in situations that mimic knowledge construction in professional practice. Learners have access to both WPI and host country experts, and are engaged through a process of initiation much like the apprentice-learning model [4]. Teambased collaborative activities provide students with multiple roles and multiple opportunities to engage material [5].

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TABLE 6.1 Sample Engineering Student Junior Year, Accommodating an International Project Typical Load of Three Courses per Term/ Project Preparation Equivalent to 1.5 Courses A Term Art history

Each Term is 7 Weeks in Duration/ Project Equivalent to Three Courses

B Term

C Term

Comm. systems

Interdisciplinary project (IQP) completed in Thailand

Discrete signal analysis Linear algebra Advanced logic Research design methods Thai culture and language

D Term Studio art

RF design Microprocessor systems design

GPP students learn by engaging real, open-ended problems in the context of human society. They must understand the broader implication of their decisions, and must in particular learn quickly how to function effectively in multicultural settings. Instruction in language and culture helps prepare them to live and work in local settings and discover how local cultural, historical, and religious influences affect how work is done and define the parameters of what is an acceptable project solution. The overall experience is designed to produce engineers who can overcome segmented thinking by working outside of disciplinary constraints, and who understand cultural, social, and intellectual diversity. By definition the projects are hands-on, interdisciplinary, and substantial (9 credit hours). Students learn to gather, analyze, and interpret quantitative and qualitative information to achieve their goals. Professional communication is emphasized throughout the project. To be dropped into Madrid, Bangkok, or Limerick (as I was) with a relatively short amount of time to complete an intensive project is an exercise in adaptability. You are in a place so culturally different from what you are accustomed to, that standing any chance of getting the resources together to finish your work demands that you learn how to adjust your usual M.O. . . . what has stuck with me about the three projects I did abroad, much more so than any particular aspect of the work itself, is understanding the types of adjustments I might have to make to work effectively with people in another culture. It is not about how to get along in Thailand so much as it is about how to get along away from your home court in general. It has been a great help professionally to already have those lessons learned as my engineering career has brought me periodically to the Far East and other parts of the world. —Daniel Boothe 2003

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Recently, the Study Abroad for Global Engagement (SAGE) research group conducted the most extensive, in-depth assessment of study abroad ever done in the US [6]. Over 6300 alumni of international programs at WPI and 22 other universities participated. Not surprisingly, results showed that study abroad had the single largest impact on participants’ lives of all college experiences. The type of international experience was found to be very important to the impact. Compared to coursework, travel seminars, and other structures, “field research and internships” such as WPI’s had the highest positive effect for improving global values and global leadership. The most surprising result was that duration abroad was not a significant factor; the study found shortterm programs such as WPI’s to be just as effective in promoting global engagement outcomes as longer programs. Students at WPI, as is common for engineering and science students in general, often come from socioeconomic backgrounds where opportunities to travel or live in foreign countries are limited. Most students going abroad for their projects find it a “transforming experience.” The program gives them the understanding and confidence to work successfully in a global world, combined with development of leadership and communication skills.

6.4 PROGRAM OVERVIEW AND IMPACT Currently, WPI operates 25 Project Centers throughout the world. Students at these centers work fulltime for a period of 7–10 weeks solving problems for local agencies and organizations in small teams, under WPI faculty supervision. The program is academically rigorous, emphasizing contextual thinking, analysis, development of useful and sustainable solutions, and persuasive presentation of results. WPI’s engineering, science, humanities, social science, and management faculty work together to develop and deliver the programs, and the student teams address interdisciplinary problems for public, private, and not-for-profit organizations worldwide. A key to the GPP’s success in involving a majority of engineering students has been substantive involvement from engineering colleagues. The program is not dependent on a handful of champions, but has become an institutional commitment. Widespread involvement by faculty across campus has helped to create a more globally aware faculty with expertise in project-based global learning, and has impact on the teaching and research on campus. The GPP is part of an institutional culture that encourages normally risk-averse engineering students to participate in large numbers and ensures that the program will be sustained into the future.

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One aspect of project advising that has meant a great deal to me is getting to know many of my students in ways that are nearly impossible to achieve even in seminars. Being privy to my students’ personal characteristics and foibles hasn’t always been an unalloyed pleasure, but overall it has immensely enriched my experience as a teacher and has been an indispensable reminder of how distinctive and often how vulnerable are the young people entrusted to us. More than any studies on the subject, project advising has impressed me with the diversity of learning styles and capabilities among students. Many who are only middling performers in the classroom truly blossom in the project setting. In fact, nearly all the students are stretched by the project experience and seeing them come to realize and revel in their capacity for dealing with all sorts of novel challenges is one of the great rewards of the project effort, for me as well as for them. —Stephen J. Weininger, Professor of Chemistry

Limited space allows only a few examples from the hundreds of projects conducted by WPI students abroad: In Cape Town, South Africa, students worked with community partners and city government to design and implement the first communal laundry facility in the informal settlements. In Venice, WPI students worked with the public and private sectors to optimize the city’s boat cargo delivery, combining sophisticated GIS applications, clever data tracking, and carefully cultivated relationships with individual boat captains to design a system that halves delivery times and the attendant boat traffic, pollution, and canal damage. WPI students in Thailand have worked to promote science literacy in impoverished areas by developing and implementing hands-on science laboratory experiments at rural schools. WPI students in Costa Rica synthesized expert knowledge of fish farming into bilingual leaflets that teach subsistence farmers in rural areas to raise fish in a simple pond, improving the family diet and adding a cash crop. Across the program, WPI students seek to develop appropriate, sustainable solutions to locally defined problems by partnering with organizations and community members. Global engagement of engineering students is a growing concern, yet the profession has made little progress toward its solution. WPI’s GPP is the oldest and arguably the most successful international program in engineering education. Its success is evidenced by methodical assessment of the program, by the accomplishments of its graduates, by national awards, and by the universities and organizations that have sought to learn about the program. Rooted in rigorous pedagogy, creatively and effectively integrated into the institution’s academic fabric, and recognized widely for its comprehensive

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approach to program management, the WPI Global Perspective Program has benefited hundreds of sponsoring organizations throughout the world while preparing thousands of engineering students for wise and effective leadership in the twenty-first century. The Global Perspective Program has become an integral part of WPI’s student and faculty culture; over 50% of students and nearly 40% of faculty participate. The institution highlights the GPP in student and faculty recruitment, development, marketing, and outreach efforts. Students report that potential employers, long ago favorably impressed by WPI’s project program, no longer ask in interviews just what the projects were about, but also where projects were completed. Extensive student and faculty participation has installed a definite “global” outlook on campus, not only for participants but also for those who stay as well. As an example, the GPP’s emphases on sustainability and the developing world have also raised awareness of those issues on campus. National recognition for the GPP has included WPI being named 1 of 16 national Leadership Institutions by AAC&U in 2002; the Association of International Educators citation for “exemplary work to internationalize the campus”; the 2003 TIAA-CREF Certificate of Excellence in the Theodore M. Hesburgh Award program for preparing faculty for the demands of supervising student projects abroad; and the 2004 Institute of International Education’s Andrew Heiskell Award for Innovation in International Education. The GPP has also drawn national media recognition; in 2007 alone, it was cited as an exemplary model of study abroad in American Scientist (Sept–Oct 2007), The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 1, 2007); The New York Times (Nov 4, 2007), The Christian Science Monitor (Sept 27, 2007), and US News & World Report (2007 Best Colleges Issue). Student work in specific locations has been highlighted in The Smithsonian and National Geographic.

My IQP in Thailand remains my single most meaningful experience at WPI. The project I worked on had a tremendous impact on how I think about international development and the need for a global point of view when analyzing complex social issues. By being able to work with a population of underserved girls with disabilities in Thailand, the challenges of integrating the demands of the project with new cultural norms were great, but the rewards were far greater. I was able to work on creating potential resolutions to serious issues and it was empowering to know that these recommendations could possibly improve the lives of others. Beyond learning the technical aspects, such as methodologies and data collection, my partners and I learned so much more from the “human” aspects of the

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project by taking a step back, rethinking preconceived notions, suspending cultural expectations and attempting to see things from another person’s perspective. —Melinda Palma 2004

6.5 IMPLEMENTATION AND EVOLUTION OF THE GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE PROGRAM The Global Perspective Program at WPI began in the 1970s and has grown steadily since its inception. Today, approximately 50% of all WPI engineering students complete at least one international project before graduation. At WPI’s Project Center, students and faculty live and work full-time addressing problems of importance to local agencies and organizations. Humanities and arts projects are currently completed at centers in Morocco and the UK. Interdisciplinary projects (IQPs) are done at centers in Australia, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Italy, Namibia, South Africa, Thailand, and the UK. WPI also runs domestic IQP centers in Washington DC, Santa Fe, Nantucket, Boston, and Worcester. Senior design projects (MQPs) can be completed at centers in Canada, China, France, Hungary, Ireland, Korea, and the UK, or domestic centers including Silicon Valley and Wall Street. In 2008–2009, approximately 500 students will complete off-campus projects at these Project Centers. Most students experience the Global Perspective Program through the IQP, which helps engineering students understand the social, cultural, and global contexts in which their lives and careers will take place. Although these interdisciplinary projects encompass a broad range of topics, certain themes are common: environment and energy; urban studies and infrastructure; capacity building and sustainable development; social implications of information technology; technology and public policy. Projects often draw on the social sciences for methods and analysis, and typically result in some process, product, or recommendations in response to the problem posted by the sponsoring organization. Students and faculty are prepared not only for the project topic but also for the cultural context in which the project will be executed. These undertakings are supported by rigorous on-campus student preparation that blends culture, history, and language of the site with intensive research on the project topics. Students develop a detailed project proposal encompassing a review of the relevant literature, the establishment of clear goals, and the formulation of a methodology appropriate for achieving specified goals. Each project,

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regardless of its area of focus, calls upon students to develop transferable skills in critical thinking and persuasive writing. Students generally receive broad problem statements from the project sponsors, and must propose specific and achievable goals. Projects typically involve topics or methods that are completely new to the students, who are called upon to independently acquire enough knowledge of the subjects to complete the work. The advisors who will accompany the students to the site also participate in this preparation, which is coordinated by WPI’s Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division. I applied to the project center in Bangkok, Thailand. I didn’t know anything about the project or my eventual teammates. Three months later, I would find myself standing ankle deep in a northeast Thailand rice field interviewing a local farmer about his farming practices with my classmates, a biomedical engineer and a mechanical engineer. The experience gave me a new appreciation for the ways science and technology can improve the lives of others and a new definition of what I could accomplish. I know for a fact that my international project work at WPI was a major factor in obtaining job offers. I had the exact mix of coursework and global experience they were looking for. —Irving Liimatta 2000

In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the IQP, student teams and faculty advisors are drawn from all of WPI’s academic departments, bringing a breadth of skills and perspectives to each project. The students work in teams of three or four with students and advisors from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds. Students and advisors work closely with the professional liaisons at the sponsoring agencies, and often engage in community-based research as well. Since each IQP involves issues at the interface between society and technology, students become aware of how their work as engineers will affect and be affected by social structures and values. Furthermore, since these projects take place far from campus, the students are confronted daily with the reality of living and working in an unfamiliar environment. This experience not only broadens their view of their professions and world events but also often leads to greater levels of self-knowledge and awareness of cultural difference. Before traveling abroad as a part of WPI’s Global Perspective Program, I was unclear about my future role in the engineering profession. My experience in the Global Perspective Program broadened my view of

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careers in technology and was the catalyst to explore the connections between technology and sustainable development. Throughout my career, I have met many people who are impressed by the integrity and leadership skills of WPI graduates. The engineering community has recognized that the WPI Global Perspective Program does not just produce well-rounded engineers; it produces well-rounded people. —Matt Arner 1998

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Senior projects (MQPs) conducted through the GPP follow a similar structure, except the focus is on engineering design, and the sponsors are more often industrial partners or research laboratories. MQP teams are given a technical challenge that requires them to go far beyond the coursework in their major to design and implement a successful solution in a professional setting. Students working at the Enterprise Research Centre in Limerick, Ireland developed a gaseous molecule detector called “e-nose,” with uses ranging from detection of gas leaks or explosives to verifying the condition of fresh foods and plants. WPI students at the Wuhan, China center work in crosscultural teams with Chinese engineering students to tackle manufacturing and industrial engineering challenges for multinational companies such as Caterpillar and United Technologies. For both IQPs and MQPs, each project is documented by an extensive written report completed during the course of the project. This report details the students’ literature search, outlines their research methodology, documents their fieldwork and analysis, and presents conclusions, findings, and recommendations in addition to any other tangible outcomes of the project. Each project team gives formal presentations of their project progress regularly, with a special emphasis on effective presentation skills. Additionally, each project culminates in a formal oral presentation of the results of the project to the sponsors and other interested parties. Recent growth of the program has focused largely on the developing world, where finding practical solutions to fundamental community needs can help students better understand issues of appropriate technology and sustainability. Expansion of these programs has also been motivated by student and faculty interest. Enrollment data reveals that WPI’s female students have particularly strong interest in development-related projects, and increasingly, students report that the opportunity to complete a project in the developing world was a deciding factor in attending WPI. Table 6.2 presents a list of projects that have recently been recognized for institutional awards by panels of external judges, reflecting the program’s shift toward the developing world; Table 6.3 presents two example projects in more detail.

“I found that my time abroad working with fellow students and professors on problems facing the real world was the highlight of my time at WPI. I learned how to apply my knowledge in real world situations while developing the confidence to live in and interact with cultures very different than my own. I developed a strong sense of self as a professional and an American as well as empathy and an appreciation for other cultures’ beliefs and practices. I was able to challenge myself academically and personally in ways I had never

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imagined before I entered WPI. I will always look back on those experiences as the time where I grew into a knowledgeable and confident person, ready to take on whatever challenges might come my way.” —Virginia Ward 2007 TABLE 6.2 Award Winning Interdisciplinary Projects from Recent Years 2008 Winners, President’s IQP Awards . Design and Construction of a Communal Laundry Station in Monwabisi Park, Cape Town . A Survey of the Waterfront of Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong . Managing Water and Sanitation in the Fish River Basin of Namibia 2007 Winners, President’s IQP Awards . Energy Profiling for Off-Grid Energization Solutions in Namibia . HIV/AIDS Prevention Education: A Look at Awareness Activities at the Polytechnic of Namibia . Developing a Strategy to Improve Solar Home System Sustainability in Rural Thailand 2006 Winners, President’s IQP Awards . Flooding and Erosion Control in the Informal Settlements of Windhoek, Namibia . Content Suggestions for Universally Designed Hearing Aids, Melbourne, Australia . Good Management Practices for Shrimp Farming in Costa Rica

TABLE 6.3 Detailed Examples of Global Perspective Program Projects Flooding and Erosion Control in the Informal Settlements of Windhoek, Namibia, 2006 Students: Nicole Labbe, Nicholas McBride, Ethan Ray Advisors: C. Demetry, Materials Science; R. Vaz, Electrical Engineering Sponsor: Namibia Housing Action Group The settlement of Otjomuise in Windhoek, Namibia experiences flooding and erosion problems during the rainy season. The goal of this project was to increase community capacity to solve rainwater problems, and was achieved using participatory methods to assess problems and develop and implement solutions. Solutions used no-cost materials and were implemented largely by the community. These implementations suggest sustainability for communitybased initiatives in Otjomuise. A broader outreach was initiated using knowledge exchange meetings and an informational pamphlet produced in both English and Afrikaans. Cultural Preservation Using Solar Technology, 2004 Students: Christopher Treat, Justin Crafford, Colin Morel, Benjamin Mar Advisor: J. Brattin, English; S. Weininger, Chemistry Sponsor: Mirror Art Group Our team worked with the Mirror Art Group to install a solar electric unit in Ban Jalae, a rural hill tribe village in northern Thailand. The photovoltaic system provides electricity for educational equipment in a cultural center that showcases Lahu customs and traditions, as part of an effort to increase awareness of Lahu culture and combat assimilation into mainstream Thai society. In addition, we analyzed the cultural and societal impacts of this technology.

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6.6 PROGRAM OVERSIGHT AND OPERATION The WPI Global Perspective Program enjoys strong support from the university’s leadership, faculty, and student body. A Dean of the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division (IGSD), who reports directly to the Provost, administers the program. The IGSD has its own operating budget and staff. Each Project Center has one or more Center Directors, faculty members who build and sustain the programs, shaping the educational mission and local impact. Generally, faculty members in these positions have reduced teaching loads. Center Directors work with local professionals and organizations to identify project opportunities, secure resources, and arrange for on-site housing and logistics. Because most sites operate only one term each year, many directors work closely with local coordinators employed by WPI at the site to maintain ongoing relationships with housing providers and sponsoring agencies. Center Directors also promote the programs, interview and select students, develop cultural preparation and orientation programming, and help orient faculty advisors to the challenges they will face. The role of faculty advisors is critical to student learning. Advisors provide guidance and mentoring to all of the student teams, sometimes in areas outside of their fields of expertise. Faculty advisors become visible to students on site as “reflective practitioners” who are continually engaged in a process of learning and discovery through a critique of both their own and their students’ activity. In this way, students are provided with models for the lifelong learning necessary to thrive in our rapidly changing world. WPI typically sends 24 students and 2 advisors to each residential Project Center. As the regular teaching load at WPI is one course per term, the institutional commitment in terms of instruction corresponds roughly to the teaching of two courses, but the overall resource implications are greater, since residential advisors generally find that guiding the students’ work to be a demanding, fulltime endeavor. The rewards of this type of mentoring, however, are substantial; the IGSD has been extremely successful in recruiting interested faculty members, often from the ranks of the most distinguished and productive members of the faculty.

When students go to the developing world—to India, to Namibia, to Morocco—they are always shocked by the lack of infrastructural development: the poor roads, the lack of basic services in water or electricity, the bureaucratic confusion that arises from a weak civil service, and so forth. Most come to appreciate more fervently the benefits of being an American,

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and this is understandable. The trick as an advisor is also to help students understand the richness of cultures that lie smothered beneath the problems of modernization. —W.A. Addison, Associate Professor of Humanities and Arts

Each year, faculty members apply from across the campus to participate as residential project advisors at the various sites. Those chosen travel with the students and reside on site during the entire experience. Responsibilities of the advisors include not only the typical academic issues that arise but also issues that take place due to living on site and off campus. Because there are special issues that arise from being away from campus for all participants—students and faculty alike—training has been developed specifically for advisors at offcampus locations. A conscientious approach to risk management has necessitated preparing advisors for worst-case scenarios, while also providing the less experienced off-campus advisors with an opportunity to learn from their colleagues who have been away often. Areas of concern that are addressed during these training sessions include: sexual harassment, transportation, drugs and alcohol, recognizing and responding to students at risk, health and safety issues, housing concerns, students’ behavior, social and personal growth, and helping students get the most of the cultural experience. All of these areas are deemed to be out of the purview of regular project advising and therefore get special attention. Each project, regardless of its area of focus, calls upon students to develop specific skills. As students work with broad problem statements and develop specific goals for their project, they are actively engaged in open-ended problem solving. Typically project topics are outside the scope of the students’ areas of study, and therefore the students must learn how to learn about new subjects. Teamwork skills are honed and practiced throughout the experience as students work together to produce a solution. The formal documentation and presentation skills required to successfully complete an academic project off campus ensure that students master how to communicate in a variety of mediums and for a variety of audiences, and that faculty develop skills in helping students achieve those competencies. In addition to the academic preparation, students are also oriented and prepared for the cultural, religious, and ethnic differences they may encounter off campus. This may include specific language training, depending on the site. Faculty members with expertise in the area provide a general history of the site where the students are going. Students are instructed as to proper dress, proper etiquette, and how to expect the host country nationals to treat them. This is all augmented with site-specific handbooks that include policies and

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paperwork, health and safety information specific to the site, logistical information regarding where they will be living, and advice for dealing with transition issues. Orientations have developed over time at WPI to be much more than the traditional lecture and review of the handbook. The model employed currently is an interactive one that addresses different learning styles, imparts the responsibility for learning about critical issues to the students, and engages them in a series of meaningful activities. 6.7 PROGRAM ASSESSMENT WPI has assessed student-learning outcomes of projects completed both on and off campus since 1986. The assessment examines WPI’s educational goals and several of the more difficult EC 2000 accreditation criteria, including multidisciplinary teaming, ethical and professional responsibility, impact of engineering in global/societal context, recognition of lifelong learning, and knowledge of contemporary issues. Results consistently show that achievement of learning outcomes in projects done abroad is very high, well above the comparison group of projects done on campus, demonstrating that GPP projects satisfy accreditation outcomes in ways that are not possible on campus. The GPP’s multilevel assessment extends from student preparation through final product evaluation and is probably the most comprehensive program assessment in international education [7]. It is likely that the extensive preparation for projects conducted off campus and the additional advising provided by project sponsors invested in producing high-quality results help account for these striking differences. The GPP recently developed a new faculty advisor assessment that is unique in international education, not just engineering. As the Global Perspective Program evolved, so did the sense that offcampus projects produced superior results. Student interest in international projects grew, as did accreditation agency pressures to demonstrate global awareness and other general education outcomes aligned with the Interactive Qualifying Project. Accordingly, considerable effort has been made to assess student learning, faculty advising, and program operation, with the greatest attention devoted to learning outcomes assessment. The program was developed in the belief that certain learning outcomes are best achieved in an offcampus setting rather than just in the classroom or through information technology, since off-campus opportunities allow students to move from self-knowledge to understanding complex relationships, multiple perspectives, and crosscultural issues [8]. The GPP instructional design includes authentic activities and contexts. Assessments that are consistent with this instructional design are usually

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performance-based [9,10]. Most other colleges provide these elements in senior-level courses. Providing them at lower levels of the curriculum can be problematic since the traditional assumption is that students must learn fundamentals before they can successfully attack significant open-ended problems. How can students solve difficult open-ended interdisciplinary problems before they have actually learned all of what they need to know in order to solve them? How can they do this in foreign culture when a significant language barrier exists? The answer lies in proper preparation, project and team management, and in providing multidimensional assessments that support the academic enterprise and inform program design and improvement. The assessment network functions at multiple levels, as the absence of any one level could degrade the student learning process. Assessment is used for continuous improvement of all program aspects. Team assignments occur prior to project initiation: GPP application information, student project preference forms, major discipline, gender, and learning styles factor are considered for coming into this decision. Required preparation classes include training in teaming and professionalism. Practice in peer and self-evaluation in team situations is included as are proper techniques for conducting meetings. During the on-site project phase (in the host location) a variety of standard tools is used to monitor team progress. Team performance contracts are often created by teams and signed by each team member. Periodic contract reviews provide a first assessment of individual contributions, and formative peer assessments help teams improve their effectiveness. Faculty advisors qualitatively evaluate group meetings with sponsors and advisors, and provide weekly written and/or oral feedback on group writing and oral presentations. An explicit grading guide is distributed early in the project so that students have a reference about how this unusual academic exercise will eventually be graded. That guide delineates how team process is assessed and how it is weighted against the final product. Each team must produce a final report and present their results and analysis in a presentation at the sponsoring agency. Advisor evaluation of these major events is the primary component of the product grade (see Table 6.4). Students also complete a final peer evaluation form that provides individual accountability. It also allows, when combined with other evidence, awarding of individual final grades. The goal of this integrated assessment plan is to maximize benefits of this experience not only for the students but also for advisors and sponsors. Developing a comprehensive assessment plan, given the complex nature of the program, was a substantial task. As at other universities, many WPI students find going abroad a transforming experience. However, evidence for this claim is primarily anecdotal and though it carries emotional force, such evidence is rarely useful in comprehensive program improvement or in probing student

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Is the team working to understand how their work relates to the sponsor and the local environment?

Does the team meet deadlines and conduct work in a timely fashion?

Is each weekly presentation clear and professional? Is the team organized and working as a team? Do all members demonstrate the ability to perform several different roles within the team (i.e., research, writing, leadership)? Does the team effectively translate issues and situations into meaningful tasks that have a clear purpose? Does the team effectively use a variety of information-gathering techniques and information resources? Does the team consistently and accurately determine whether information is credible and relevant to tasks? Is the team aware of feedback, attentive to advice (e.g., taking notes and minutes at meetings), and responsive to that advice by making corrections and adjustments as needed? Does the team show determination in the pursuit of solutions and use strategies to keep themselves on task?

Do ALL members of the team fully engage in the preparation activities? Do ALL members participate in weekly meetings? Is the student-generated agenda well-organized, well-written, and professional for the weekly meetings?

Assessing Process Quality

Assessing Product Quality

Did the team effectively document and report information about the project, in written and oral form, including a professional presentation to the sponsor? Did the team demonstrate knowledge of the interaction between the project work and the local context? Did the finished project demonstrate appropriate findings in which the conclusions were properly derived from complete analysis of the evidence gathered?

Were there clearly stated, achievable goals, appropriately defined, and qualified by the project team? Did the team strive to achieve as much balance possible between the technical and social/humanistic aspects of the project topic? Did the project achieve the goals? Did the team demonstrate knowledge of the relevant literature and other background sources; evaluate this material critically and apply it appropriately to the project work? Did the team take initiative? Did the students make the project their own, and pursue its completion independently? Did the team design and apply appropriate methodologies to achieve the goal? Did each student fulfill his/her responsibilities to partners, sponsors, advisors, and other students? Did the team analyze the data or information collected in an appropriate fashion?

TABLE 6.4 Indicators of Quality in the Process and the Product of Student Projects

Assessing student project work

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learning across the entire study abroad cohort. Hence, assessment efforts have sought a deeper and broader understanding of the social, professional, and cognitive growth demonstrated by students as a result of their global experience, using a variety of research and assessment tools for program evaluation. The multilevel, multitemporal assessment process includes a fairly well developed and comprehensive program-level assessment, a new faculty-level assessment, and frequent student-level evaluations. The major evaluation tool for the student work product of IQPs is that reports written by on- and off-campus teams and submitted for grades during a calendar year are read periodically and evaluated by a team of paid faculty reviewers. This practice was established over a decade ago. Although this assessment probes only the written product, it has proven quite useful in identifying characteristics of high-quality projects. For each evaluation cycle, a team of 10–12 experienced faculty project advisors is recruited to serve as reviewers. They meet for two half-day workshops for training and calibration. The process uses an internally developed evaluation form for assessment of each report. Prior to each review cycle the form is reviewed, discussed, and updated as appropriate. WPI has spent considerable effort writing rubrics to standardize the evaluation. For calibration, each reviewer is given the same project reports to read and evaluate using the form. The group convenes for a second half-day to debrief each evaluation, attempt to calibrate against the rubrics, and minimize variance in application of the rubrics. Very often rubrics are rewritten on the basis of the discussion. The evaluation form contains questions regarding project objectives, quality of the literature review, application of appropriate methodologies, findings and analysis of data, achievement of educational goals, and quality of the writing and presentation. Recent additions include sections related to new engineering accreditation outcomes [11,12] that the IQP potentially addresses. The outcomes important for new accreditation requirements are as follows: . . . . .

Ability to function on multidisciplinary teams; Recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning; Knowledge of contemporary issues; Understanding of professional and ethical responsibility; Broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context.

Table 6.5 presents example rubrics, showing the scales used for evaluating ABET Outcome 3h “the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context.” The evaluation is designed to facilitate objective assessment of both on- and off-campus project reports. Each reviewer is randomly assigned 15–20 reports

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TABLE 6.5 Rubrics for Evaluation of Accreditation Outcome for “Impact of Engineering Solutions in a Global and Societal Context” Exposure to Global Issues and/or Foreign Cultures Rating 5: excellent The project was conducted at a foreign off-campus site and dealt, in a substantive fashion, with topics that were clearly global in nature or international in scope. If conducted on campus, the project focused on and effectively analyzed topics that were clearly identified as global or international. Rating 3: acceptable The project was conducted at a foreign off-campus site or dealt, in a substantive fashion, with topics that were clearly global in nature or international in scope. Rating 1: poor The project was conducted on campus and contained only oblique indications that the students were aware that some of the problems being addressed were global or international in character. Impact of Engineering Solutions on Society Rating 5: excellent The project is focused heavily, if not entirely, on such an impact and evaluates it effectively using the most appropriate methodologies. Rating 3: acceptable Evaluation of such an impact is a significant component of the project and was conducted using sensible methods (if not state-of-the-art). Rating 1: poor Evaluation of such an impact is a relatively peripheral or incidental component of the project and appropriate methodologies either were not employed or shed little light on this issue.

to read and evaluate. Data from each form is entered into a database for analysis. Many student reports approach 100 pages in length. The evaluation form has 35 questions and subquestions, including comment entries. Hence, the reviewer’s task is not a small one! Within the program there is an Assessment Coordinator who analyzes the results and writes a report to the WPI community. Separate reports are prepared for each academic department summarizing results for their own students. The GPP staff works collaboratively on continuous improvement issues as informed by assessment measures such as the one described. These may involve changes in the student preparation, advisor training, sponsor consultation, resource allocation, or any other issues identified as problematic from the review process. Below are described some examples of program review results and how they are used. The most striking result has been a persistent and significant quality gap between on- and off-campus (GPP) projects. This gap emerged with GPP expansion and has grown each year since 1997. Assessment results show that

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projects conducted by student teams at off-campus sites consistently outrank those done on campus in nearly aspect. GPP students were better able to develop project objectives, synthesize the appropriate literature, and employ proper methods than those who remained on campus. They also conduct more appropriate analysis, draw sounder conclusions, and communicate the results better in written form than nonparticipants. Although GPP participants are selected through an involved application process, there are not significant GPA differences between them and oncampus students. It is possible that issues such as learning preferences, motivation, willingness to take intellectual risks, teaming skills, and other attributes separate the GPP cohort from their peers who stay on campus. It is also the case that off-campus projects involve more deliberate preparation and enjoy more focused attention from both faculty and students. In an attempt to replicate the off-campus quality, WPI created a project center within the city of Worcester and structured it similarly to global centers. Initial assessments show encouraging improvements in team product quality despite small cohort sizes. However, the program has struggled to attract students and cannot provide the international experiences that many of them seek. Program-level assessment has indicated other areas for improvement and has provided a base from which to design that improvement. The assessment is designed to avoid the pitfalls associated with over-reliance on anecdotal data and is directly related to the educational objectives of the IQP. Hence, curricular improvements designed to address program deficiencies can be made with some confidence. Faculty advising has also been the subject of a strong assessment effort. The roles and responsibilities of the off-campus project team advisor are unlike those of traditional teaching. All student work is done outside the classroom; all of it is done in teams; each team has a different, complex, open-ended project; and rarely does the advisor have deep technical expertise in the project topic. Students are also responsible to the sponsoring agency, whose goals may sometimes diverge from WPI’s academic goals. In practice, the entire GPP requires faculty and staff to work in teams, something many faculty are not inclined to do! The advising team’s prime academic role is really that of project manager and coach. In addition to academic roles, advisors must also handle the myriad problems that can arise during any study abroad sojourn. This requires advisors to handle cultural orientation, culture shock, and communication issues; and be an on-site counselor, disciplinarian, enforcer of university policies, mentor, team process facilitator, social event coordinator, risk manager, health and safety officer, and ultimately evaluator (a final grade is assigned). However, they do not do all this in a vacuum; WPI has established an extensive support system for the program. All off-campus advisors apply

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TABLE 6.6 Advisor Dimensions and Assessment Data Source Dimension

Project support and facilitation Personal support and accessibility Cultural guidance and orientation Policy compliance

Source Students

Coadvisor

Global Studies Division

Yes Yes Yes —

— Yes Yes —

— — Yes Yes

for the position and are screened before official appointment. All are also required to attend in-depth workshops that typically focus on developing advising skills in nonacademic areas [13]. Almost always, experienced advisors are assigned to mentor new advisors. Just as good classroom teaching evaluation is used for improving teaching and presumably improving student learning, WPI’s experience is that good advising results in better student learning and better achievement of academic goals. Accordingly, the university set out to develop and implement an advisor assessment that could be used for both reward and remediation. However, there is little or no specific literature providing experience for evaluating a teaching experience such as described here. Published work on classroom teaching evaluation served as the basis [14]; the GPP contracted an expert in teaching evaluation (Dr. R. Arreola of Memphis State University), formed a committee of students, staff, and faculty, and developed an evaluation process. Table 6.6 summarizes the overall dimensions that were deemed important for advisors. Within each dimension are several specific characteristics (not shown here). Table 6.8 illustrates the most appropriate source for gathering assessment data on each dimension. The approach was to develop the student evaluation form first and pilot-test an advisor evaluation form to be completed by students at the end of the sojourn. The form has 48 questions rated on a strongly disagree to strongly agree Likert-type scale. Multiple questions address each of the dimensions (except policy compliance) shown above. There is also room for open-ended questions and responses. Dr. Arreola completed the first round of the evaluation form including some recommendations for item wording. The goal is a validated, multisource advisor evaluation process that recognizes the seriousness of this teaching experience, evaluates multiple dimensions, and is useful for remediation and reward. Assessment results suggest strongly that third-year engineering and science students can solve ambiguous open-ended problems in off-campus contexts, contribute to the local environment, and simultaneously satisfy general education and technical graduation requirements. The program is not restricted to an elite group of highly qualified students but in fact is made

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available to a majority of WPI students. However, being able to provide high quality off campus, and in most cases international, experiences for WPI students is not something that appeared suddenly, nor was it implemented casually. The complexity of offering experiences like these to most of our undergraduate body demands constant supervision and modification. Ongoing assessment at all of the various levels of operation has been a critical component of the program’s success and the quality of student experience. In conclusion, the GPP assessment processes were designed to evaluate several aspects of an extensive and fairly complex program. Results consistently show that GPP participants satisfy important educational objectives at higher performance levels than nonparticipants. Assessment results have regularly guided improvements and resource allocation for the on-campus experience. Future work will move more from the assessment level to the research level to answer key research questions: What sort of lasting intellectual, professional, and personal growth occurs? Does the experience prepare them well for a lifetime of learning? Can this short-term sojourn develop an appropriate level of cultural awareness world-mindedness? How do language skills, particularly the lack thereof, affect the quality of the learning experience? Do the outcomes observed transfer to new academic and other contexts postsojourn? How is self-efficacy affected by the sojourn? These are deeper questions requiring a multifaceted research program currently in development. 6.8 RISK MANAGEMENT As the number of WPI students going off campus increased, it became obvious that the university could not work in a vacuum to address risk management. It only took one perceived crisis in the making to bring the right players together from across campus to form a team to consider the risks associated with sending students away to complete projects. This risk management approach WPI employs involves both philosophical and operational aspects. The philosophical approach aims to identify, analyze, and manage risks, while the operational approach involves tailoring practical solutions for each site. The ultimate goal of this combination is to protect the students, the advisors, the program, and the institution. Part of the process of working toward managing risks was defining what “risk management” means to the University. The risk management team identified various exposures and measured them against WPI’s willingness and ability to withstand potential losses resulting from those exposures. The team then determined how to implement policies and practices to best control these identified risks with appropriate procedures. The resulting policies and procedures are reviewed each year.

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A crucial part of managing to control identified risks is the training that WPI provides students and faculty advisors. The IGSD has developed an operational handbook for faculty advisors who are on site with the students. In addition to all of the information included in the students’ handbook, the faculty are provided with more information that they may need while in residence; included is a Crisis Management Plan that contains a detailed description of what to do and who to contact in the event of an emergency. Emergencies that are anticipated include such events as natural disasters, crimes that may be committed against a student, crimes that may be committed by a student, a student’s disappearance, sexual harassment, assault, and violations of the WPI’s Code of Conduct. Faculty advisors are provided with an extensive list of names and contact numbers for the WPI Crisis Management Team on campus. WPI expects faculty advisors to attend a full day of training prior to their departure for a project center; such sessions are held annually, and the training has evolved over time. Initially, a group of experienced faculty and professional staff met to develop a list of the outcomes WPI wanted off-campus faculty advisors to take away with them at the end of a one-day training session. All outcomes fit into three general areas: academic, interpersonal, and operational issues. Specific outcomes identified that did not fall within the academic realm included crosscultural issues, group dynamics, risk management, policies, time management, conflict management, self awareness of own cultural issues, and a category defined as “whole student advising.” The list revealed the need to engage other on-campus professionals with relevant expertise to help develop the training. In the first year, the director of counseling services, dean of student life, university risk manager, diversity officer, and director of academic resources—all experts in their respective areas—were invited to help develop the training needed to target the identified outcomes. By working with actual cases based on recent WPI experience, advisors preparing to embark on an offcampus experience were introduced to challenging situations and strategies to handle them. The cases were chosen to highlight issues proven important to a successful experience. The discussions were designed to engage all participants in small group work as they struggled with solutions. A panel of WPI professionals who deal with these issues while students are on campus responded to each of the cases and the solutions proposed. The design of that day’s training provided opportunities for collaboration and mentoring among all of the constituencies—two key activities identified early in the planning stages as critical to the success of the advisors. The model has continued to be one of collaboration and interaction, although the themes each year have shifted to accommodate areas of concern. For example, in 2007 the theme was developing a holistic approach to an

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off-campus experience, and participants had the opportunity to think about the cultural aspects of going off campus and being more intentional about students’ growth throughout and beyond the experience. In 2008, discussion and interaction was focused on preparing advisors and students to deal with issues of different culture, racism, bigotry, poverty, and perceptions of personal safety and comfort in a new place, whether it be Boston or Bangkok, Worcester or Windhoek. The theme of the 2009 retreat was “Keeping Things in Perspective: Issues of Health and Safety While Off Campus,” as data gathered over the last few years dictated the need for a focus on these critical issues. Depending upon the theme, collaboration with offices across campus continues to prepare advisors for situations they almost certainly have not had to deal with on campus. Each year, administrative staff gathers feedback from the participants of the retreat to evaluate its effectiveness. A simple form is distributed and collected at the end of the day. The following prompts constitute the formal evaluation form: 1. List three things that you found valuable at this retreat. 2. List anything that you found unimportant at this retreat. 3. Identify anything that you, as a project advisor, may do differently as a result of having attended this retreat. 4. Make suggestions for future retreats Evaluation results for the last 5 years that the training has been offered are summarized in Table 6.7. For each year the number of participants or trainees is indicated—for example, in 2006, 26 faculty members were trained. The response rates on these evaluations have been quite high—averaging 81% over 5 years. The “actual number” refers to how many participants turned in a completed evaluation, for example, in 2007, 28 of the 32 trainees chose to submit an evaluation. The “potential number” of positive responses TABLE 6.7 Evaluation Results of Faculty Training Retreats 2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

PN AN RR PN AN RR PN AN RR PN AN RR PN AN RR (%) (%) (%) (%) (%) No. of 26 participants No. of 60 good things No. of 60 unimportant

20

77

30

20

67

32

28

88

32

30

94

30

24

80

51

85

60

54

90

84

51

61

90

68

76

72

68

94

5

8

60

2

3

84

9

11

90

31

34

72

13

18

PN ¼ potential no. of responses, AN ¼ actual no. of responses, RR ¼ response rate.

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and negative responses is provided (three times the “actual number”). For example, in 2006 there was potential for 60 “important” responses and 60 “unimportant” responses; however, there were in actuality 54 “important” issues and only 2 “unimportant” issues identified by the respondents. The high number of positive responses (items listed as “important”) versus the low number of negative (items listed as “unimportant”) suggests that there is high value perceived by those participating in the training for each of the years. In addition to measuring how satisfied participants are with the retreat, responses to item 4 solicit ideas for future retreats and help determine the focus of subsequent training. In this way facilitators are able to respond to needs identified by the advisors. In 2009, it was clear after reviewing incident data about off-campus incidents that it was time for another training session solely focused on health and safety. Table 6.8 illustrates the increase of incidents related to health and safety issues. In 2006–2007, a total of 13 incidents were documented; by 2008–2009 that number rose to 40, a trend that could not be ignored. In response to those data the retreat was organized around issues of health and safety while off campus. Cofacilitators included the IGSD’s Director of Global Operations, the Dean of Students, and WPI’s Compliance Officer, whose duties include university risk management. In addition to a review of the data presented above, strategies were presented and discussed with all participants about how to best mitigate and manage incidents of student misbehavior, medical emergencies, and other categories of concern. Resources that were utilized included Gerald Wilde’s Target Risk, the US Army’s model for risk assessment, and Cooper’s Colors—a useful graphic for depicting levels of awareness to risk. To help illustrate all of these issues, TABLE 6.8 Off-Campus Incidents Reported Over Three Academic Years 20 18 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0

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case studies were presented from actual occurrences from the past 3 months at WPI off-campus project centers. Participants discussed these case studies, first in small groups and then within the entire group. Different perspectives were shared as were strategies to deal with such things as a student gone missing, a broken arm due to participation in a recreational activity, muggings, inappropriate behavior within a housing facility, the importance of vetting housing, and so on. The completed evaluations indicated that use of these case studies was considered beneficial to the participants and that respondents valued the discussion of such issues. It was extremely helpful to hear newer approaches to handling questions of behavior that are less “knee-jerk” and more complex and educational. I now have more ideas about responding to and anticipating responses about how to approach behavior as well as students’ thinking about their actions. —Advisor evaluation comment from 2009 Annual Advisor Retreat By collaborating with WPI’s professional staff, the GPP has been able to develop a meaningful training program that empowers the faculty charged with leading student groups off campus in pursuit of academic credit. These professionals, who include the Director of the Student Development Center, the Director of Diversity & Women’s Programs, the Associate Treasurer, the Director of Risk Management, the Dean of Student Life, the Director of Minority Affairs, the Director of Health Services, the Director of Healthy Alternatives, the Director of the Academic Resources Center, and the Student Disabilities Coordinator, bring expertise from which the faculty can benefit. By using case studies based on previous incidents, it is possible to engage the faculty in significant discussions of what can and does happen while off campus. With a combination of recent incidents and discussion of other possible challenges, WPI is able to equip faculty leaders with strategies and resources for dealing with a wide range of nonacademic issues. 6.9 TRANSFERABILITY AND DIFFUSION Only recently has a global experience become widely regarded as highly desirable for engineering education; many institutions are just now creating such opportunities. Rigid curricula, cost, and lack of leadership have been cited as reasons for slow adoption. Some faculty believe international experiences are not possible for most engineering students; WPI’s program demonstrates

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that is not the case. Accordingly, the GPP has had an impact on many other institutions. In recent years over 40 universities, 10 education abroad providers, and organizations such as NSF, Sigma Xi, and AAC&U have either invited WPI to their campuses and workshops or sent delegations to WPI specifically to learn about aspects of the GPP. The universities comprise a wide range of types and sizes, including MIT, Harvard, Rose-Hulman, Michigan Tech, Auburn, Lehigh, RIT, Olin, U. Arizona, and U. Minnesota. Furthermore, through participation in organizations such as NAFSA and The Forum on Education Abroad, WPI has become a leader in promoting responsible management of experiential study abroad, increasingly recognized as the most-effective form of study abroad. Some aspects of the program have already been adopted. The “Interprofessional Projects” program at Illinois Institute of Technology shows clear influence from WPI’s interdisciplinary projects, and WPI President Emeritus Edward Parrish was instrumental in the development of ABET’s EC 2000 criteria. Domenico Grasso, founding director of the Picker Engineering Program at Smith College, is a WPI alumnus, and it is perhaps no surprise that many aspects of that admirable program bear resemblance to WPI’s. Similarly, the founders of the Olin College of Engineering visited WPI multiple times while planning the College and have hosted presentations by WPI to understand the GPP fully. 6.10 CONCLUSION The challenges of the twenty-first century will require engineers with the leadership skills and wisdom to influence policy and improve the human condition. Future leaders in technology must learn to work effectively and collaboratively across both disciplines and borders to address the most pressing problems facing our world. International experiences will be a key component in preparing these future leaders. Through its Global Perspective Program, WPI has sent more engineering and science students abroad than any other US college or university, and in doing so has demonstrated that such initiatives can be scalable, sustainable, and at the heart of the curriculum. In addition to providing global experiences to over half the students at WPI, the program emphasizes critical thinking, research skills, analysis, persuasive writing, and open-ended problem solving, all key elements in the education of future leaders. In fact, the centrality of project work to the WPI curriculum is the key the Global Perspective Program’s success. Precisely because the program operates at the heart of the curriculum, rather than at its periphery, it has become a signature program for the university and an essential element of the institutional fabric: sought after by the student body, championed by the faculty, and stoutly supported by the administration.

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REFERENCES 1. R. Bhandari and P. Chow, Open Doors 2008; Report on International Educational Exchange. New York: Institution of International Education, 2008. 2. J. Herrington and R. Oliver, “An Instructional Design Framework for Authentic Learning Environments.” Educational Technology Research and Development, vol. 48, pp. 23–48, Sept. 2000. 3. J. S. Brown, A. Collins and P. Duguid, “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning.” Educational Researcher, vol. 18, pp. 32–42, Jan–Feb 1989. 4. J. Dewey and R. D. Archambault. John Dewey on Education: Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. 5. J. Lave and E. Wenger, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 6. “SAGE: Study Abroad for Global Engagement. Beyond Immediate Impact.” University of Minnesota, 2009. Available: http://www.cehd.umn.edu/projects/ sage/. 7. D. DiBiasio and N. A. Mello, “Multilevel Assessment of Program Outcomes: Assessing a Nontraditional Study Abroad Program in the Engineering Disciplines.” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, vol. 10, pp. 237–252, Fall 2004. 8. P.W. Davis and N.A. Mello, “AWorld-Class Education, Last Word.” ASEE Prism, vol. 68, January 2003. 9. G. Loacker. Self Assessment at Alverno College. Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College Institute, 2000. 10. M. Mentkowski. Learning That Lasts, Integrating Learning, Development, and Performance in College and Beyond. Milwaukee, WI: Alverno College Publications, 2000. 11. D. DiBiasio, N.A. Mello and D. Woods, “Multidisciplinary Teamwork: Academic Practices and Assessment of Student Outcomes,” paper presented at Best Assessment Processes III Conference, Rose-Hulman University, Terre Haute, IN, April, 2000. 12. M. Besterfield-Sacre, L.J. Shuman, H. Wolfe, C.J. Atman, J. McGourty, R.L. Miller, B.M. Olds and G.M. Rogers, “Defining the Outcomes: A Framework for EC 2000.” IEEE Transactions on Education, vol. 43, pp. 100–110, 2000. 13. N.A. Mello, “Risk Management, Safety Issues and How WPI Meets the Interorganizational Task Force Good Practices for Health and Safety.” SAFETI OnLine Newsletter, vol. 3, no. 1, 2005. Available: http://www.globaled.us/safeti/ v3n1_mello.html. 14. R. Arreola, Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System, 2nd edn. Boston: Anker Publishers, 2000.

CHAPTER 7

FOSTERING CITIZENSHIP AND ADVOCACY THROUGH THE HUMANITIES AND ARTS SVETLANA NIKITINA and DAVID SPANAGEL

7.1 INTRODUCTION Are the liberal arts central or peripheral to educating leaders of science and technology of the twenty-first century? How and why should a robust humanities and arts curriculum be integrated into the polytechnic environment? We demonstrate in this chapter how, through serious engagement with the liberal arts, the particular culture of inquiry (which is essential for training scientists and engineers as described in Chapter 1) can be developed and sustained. We believe exposure to humanities and arts disciplines is not only intellectually valuable but is in fact indispensable to the goal of equipping engineering students for effective citizenship in today’s world. The challenges of the twenty-first century cannot be met by purely technical solutions, conceived or implemented in isolation from global social, environmental, political, and moral contexts. Therefore, it is essential that our students be given complementary sets of intellectual tools, and opportunities to interact with multiple sets of disciplinary perspectives and value systems, so they can cultivate the human skills they will need to grapple with all these challenges successfully. Since its inception in 1865, WPI has recognized and institutionalized the importance of the humanities in a variety of ways. Originally established as a Free Institute of Industrial Science amid the stresses and opportunities provided by the ongoing Industrial Revolution and an American Civil War, the Institute’s educational program focused initially on providing practical Shaping Our World: Engineering Education for the 21st Century, First Edition. Edited by Gre´tar Tryggvason and Diran Apelian. Ó 2012 by The Materials, Metals, & Materials Society. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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experiences that would directly support commercial applications of electrical and mechanical engineering know-how. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, it had become clear to WPI’s leaders that success in industry requires a more sophisticated set of relationships among research, teaching, and commercial activities. Interestingly, the humanities were identified as a lynchpin for enabling these relationships. As a token of the broader intellectual demands WPI made on its students at the dawn of the twentieth century, the Class of 1879 generously endowed a fund in 1900 to support an annual prize for the best term paper written for the Departments of English, History, and Languages. Along with the adoption of the revolutionary WPI Plan in 1970, yet another reconfiguration of departments and requirements left the Humanities and Arts (HUA) Department as one of the largest and most important departments on campus, despite the relatively small fraction of undergraduates who chose to major in its subfields. At the same time, a so-called “sufficiency” project (individually advised by a faculty member from one or another of the humanistic disciplines) was made one of the three project experiences required of all WPI graduates. Over the years, the HUA requirement has become more rigorous with courses in more humanities and arts subdisciplines. The college recently approved a new structure, which differentiates between the depth and the breadth of concentration. Students can achieve depth in a wide array of humanities and arts fields of study (including art history, architecture, drama/theater, German, Spanish, history, literature, music, philosophy, religion, rhetoric, and writing). Employing more than 50 faculty members, the HUA department contributes more to the college’s intellectual life than disciplinary courses and original scholarship. HUA faculty members participate extensively in many campus-wide initiatives and core interdisciplinary programs such as the First-Year Experience (FYE), Writing Across the Curriculum, Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD), and the Environmental Engineering major. HUA is also an active participant in WPI’s Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Global Perspective Program (IGSD)—running its own off-campus seminars and projects in England, Germany, and Morocco. Cross-campus collaborations continue to emerge, building strong bonds between humanistic and scientific disciplines, and engineering. The Humanities and Arts Requirement (now consisting of five courses and a culminating inquiry seminar/practicum) introduces students to the breadth, diversity, and creativity of human experience; fosters students’ ability to think critically and independently about the world; encourages students to reflect on their responsibilities to others in local, national, and global communities; and enhances students’ ability to communicate effectively with others in a spirit of openness and cooperation. Within their HUA required

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coursework, students have specific opportunities to “explore their own creativity