Innovation and Diversity in Engineering Education

CEEA Institute for Engineering Teaching and Educational Research (IETER)

The CEEA Institute for Engineering Teaching and Educational Research (IETER) will run on Saturday June 3, 2017 (immediately preceding the conference). The workshops will be held concurrently (choose one!) in the same location as the CEEA 2017 conference. The fee for the Institute is $200.00 plus HST and fees and the registration will run separately.  Walk up registrations will NOT be accepted for this event. Watch for details!

• Workshop T: Teaching for effective learning in engineering
• Workshop R: Engineering Education Research

Engineering case studies are a representation of an engineering challenge that can be used to connect academic theory and engineering practice. Writing cases is often the best way to get the best fit between pedagogical objectives and case material, but few people have experience writing cases. In this workshop, participants will learn how to: identify essential features of a good case study, align cases with course learning objectives, identify appropriate case sources, and outline a suitable case study.

John R. Cocchio, Ellen Watson, Neil Anderson, and Lianne Lefsrud

This course addresses all 12 CEAB GAs; however, we propose to focus our workshop to examine upwards of six (6) graduate attributes, specifically: a) Investigation, b) Team work, c) Communication skills, d) Professionalism, e) Impact of technology, and f) Ethics and equity. In this workshop, participants will learn and apply a process to map these CEAB GA attributes to a course, and will critically evaluate course components in order to generate improvements in course content and delivery.

Mike Klassen, and John Donald

Engineering leadership is a growing area of programming and research in engineering education in Canada. In this workshop, we want to develop relationships among engineering educators interested in introducing leadership to their students. Participants will gain understanding of the broader field of engineering leadership education and the wide range of programs, courses and activities being developed by other universities, place their own work within clusters of more specific practices (e.g. integrating teamwork into a design course; leading a stand-alone engineering leadership course; supporting student leaders to reflect on their learning), find out who to go to for more in-depth exchange and build relationships with other practitioners within this field in Canada, as a means to further learning exchange and collaboration.

Peter Eliot Weiss, Estelle Oliva-Fisher, and Cori Hanson

The Positive Space “campaign” has existed at our university for over twenty years and, uniquely, in the Faculty of Engineering for eight years. Its purpose is to raise awareness and discussion of LGBTQ issues and challenges in a collegial and non-judgmental atmosphere. Participants in this workshop will create a foundation for dealing with changing terminology, develop competencies for discussing LGBTQ issues, gain knowledge of available resources, people and events that support inclusivity, develop strategies for responding to homophobic and transphobic incidents, deepen awareness of LGBTQ issues on campus and more broadly, and gain knowledge of available resources, people and events that support inclusivity

Jeffrey Harris, Marnie Jamieson

In the flipped classroom, the roles of homework (application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation tasks) and lecture (knowledge and comprehension tasks) are reversed, allowing for higher-order learning in the classroom. The flipped classroom can be an effective teaching strategy in engineering. Participants in the workshop will learn about flipped classroom strategies, teaching best practices, and develop a plan to flip one lecture from a course they teach. The workshop will model the flipped classroom: participants will be asked to watch a brief video and answer a survey in advance of the workshop.

Margaret Gwyn, Éric Germain, Michele Heng

Most Canadian Engineering schools have now been through one cycle of accreditation under the new graduate attributes model. An early step of this process was to define indicators; now, armed with a few years of experience and the comments of accreditation visitors, many programs are starting to think about their indicators again. In this workshop, participants will: learn CEAB’s official definition of “indicator”, be exposed to different real-life approaches towards indicators, create a list of criteria for assessing indicators, developed responses to common concerns about indicator review, critique a set of indicators, and decide what next steps to take at their own schools.

Robyn Paul, Arin Sen, Emily Wyatt

At the University of Calgary, we have found that one of the most effective ways to engage first year engineering students in a conversation about Engineering Leadership is to have them participate in a fun and engaging activity followed by impactful and tangible reflections. In this workshop, participants will experience a hands-on activity that teaches engineering leadership skills with the use of Lego, identify the components of developing an activity that provide students with professional development skills through engaged experiences and reflection activities that deepen that engagement and learning.

Shalaleh Rismani, Emma M. Smith, Mike Van der Loos, Bill Miller

The development of assistive technologies requires expertise from a range of professionals to ensure devices are relevant, usable, and sustainable. While there may be efforts made to collaborate across disciplines, these are often fragmented and insufficient. While most professionals understand the importance of input from others outside their field, we may struggle to define what form meaningful collaboration should take. At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to identify three benefits to collaboration across disciplines in engineering and health professional education, identify three risks of fragmented or insufficient collaboration in the development of health and assistive technologies, apply a model of Interprofessional Education (IPE) to engineering and health professional education, and identify challenges and opportunities in their own teaching environments for the implementation of collaborative professional education.

Rodrigo Cutri

In a negotiation, the variables of power, time, and information directly influence decision making. The goal of this game is to promote reflection concerning trading, teamwork, and human influence on the sustainable development of Earth. In this workshop, participants will learn, practice and reflect on negotiation techniques.

Gordon Stubley, Trevor Holmes, Julie Timmermans

Research from the past decade suggests that focusing our attention on identifying “bottlenecks” or “threshold concepts” – troublesome and sometimes transformational ideas – can help us to design courses and programs around concepts that have great potential to impact deep and lasting change in student learning (Meyer, J. H. F., & Land, R. (2003). In this workshop, participants will learn how to recognize concepts within a course/program that are more important than others and worthy of greater attention, identify a troublesome or transformational concept in their own course or program, and identify the steps that novice learners can take to achieve expert understanding of the threshold concept.

Jake Kaupp

In order to avoid being “data-rich and insight poor,” we must develop methods and tools to understand the data that we possess and move towards insight and understanding. We have to be able to effectively visualize or “see” what the data is telling us. We also need to be able to communicate with data, to present its story to others, and to engage them in being part of the process rather than just a consumer. This is critical for many engineering educators who routinely seek to engage students to be a more active partner in assessment and encourage reflective practice. In this workshop, participants will engage in broad thinking about creating visualizations of academic data, identify information/design elements of effective visualizations, improve upon common approaches to visualize academic data, develop a guided workflow to create, present and distribute visualizations in reports and identify different tools and methods to visualize academic data.

Jillian Seniuk Cicek, Penny Kinnear, Patricia Sheridan, Deborah Tihanyi

Building on last year’s workshop “The Responsive Researcher”, which explored the complexities and challenges in engineering education research, this year’s iteration is aimed at providing a starting point for a sustainable community that allows for the sharing of knowledge, resources, and connections among engineering education researchers. Participants will identify personal/disciplinary assumptions about “valid” and “invalid” research methods within discipline(s) and “rigour,” and how these assumptions feed into engineering education research, explore the role and practice of reflection in research, and develop strategies to incorporate these understandings into individual research practice

Deborah Tihanyi, Lydia Wilkinson, Ken Tallman

Arts opportunities for engineers can increase engagement, critical thinking, teamwork and confidence in multidisciplinary environments. At the University of Toronto, we offer a series of in-house Humanities electives for engineers that focus on developing interest and abilities in the creative arts. In addition to these high-level initiatives, we can find ways to integrate arts into our regular classroom activities, by developing modules, assignments or exercises that engage the creativity of our students as engineers. In this workshop, participants will identify an arts-based course, or new or existing project for arts integration, become familiar with arts techniques and activities currently used in engineering electives, brainstorm activities for their arts-initiative, develop and share insights with colleagues working on similar projects.

Robin Sacks

Lifelong learning is the arguably the least well understood and most difficult to assess of the CEAB attributes. In this workshop, participants will explore elements of lifelong learning from various disciplinary perspectives; assess the various definitions, models and vocabulary associated with lifelong learning and identify relevant and useful elements of lifelong learning for engineers and Faculties of Engineering; and begin to co-construct an engineering-specific model of lifelong learning.

Todd Murphy, Adam Goodman, Patricia Kristine Sheridan

While leadership coaching is increasingly prominent and valued in private and public organizations, university faculties have been slow to adopt coaching as a pedagogy. Coaching provides students with a mode for developing their leadership and teamwork skills in project teams/student organisations while creating an intentional and reflective understanding of their leadership skills and capabilities. This workshop guides participants through a condensed version of the coaching training available at the Northwestern University’s Center for Leadership. In this workshop participants will gain understanding of and appreciation for the coaching process, identify situations in their teaching practice in which a coaching approach may be beneficial, establish and practice the skills and techniques involved in coaching students, and become aware of their abilities to coach and be coached.

Marnie Jamieson, Sean Maw

Many engineering students (and faculty) think ideation means brainstorming. However, other ideation techniques can often provide a more effective and productive session. The purpose of this workshop is to share experience and experiment with various ideation techniques to equip design instructors with additional tools for providing a richer ideation experience to support creative and innovative design at their home institution. Participants will identify effective ideation techniques including ones that may already be used by attendees, explain the bases and purposes of different techniques, and develop experience and skill with ideation techniques by applying them in a group setting. Pre–workshop work is requested. Prospective attendees will be asked to consider which ideation techniques they know and/or use, and the effectiveness of the techniques.

Bryan Karney, Sasha Gollish, Anne Mather

Mathematics is central to engineering because it is the primary means by which engineers are able to model systems to solve most technical engineering problems. In addition, it allows engineers to understand the consequences of their intended actions, designs, operations and technical systems. Many undergraduate engineering programs delegate the instruction of their mathematics courses to mathematics departments. These courses are often based in abstract, rather than applied, mathematics with few or no examples rooted in engineering. A more student-centred approach may be to offer these mathematics courses through the faculty of engineering in order to provide students with a more integrated learning experience, one that could still be grounded in abstract mathematics, but with applied, engineering examples. Participants will discuss the dynamic between applied (concrete) and abstract mathematics, identify barriers to providing this kind of mathematics education to undergraduates, and assess the extent to which there is a real and/or perceived mathematical deficiency in subsequent engineering courses (i.e. any undergraduate engineering courses that use mathematics after the foundational mathematics course).

Brian Frank, Marnie Jamieson, Peter Weiss

This EGAD workshop will allow participants to work in groups to examine continuous program improvement processes of fictitious but realistic programs. Participants will take on the role of external reviewers, and examine the process, data, and program changes made by programs in short case studies that focus on one graduate attribute. The case studies will be adapted from anonymized real Canadian programs, providing an opportunity to examine multiple approaches.

William Rosehart, Marjan Eggermont, Genevieve Hoffart, Thomas O’Neill, Nicole Larson

Real-world engineering practice requires a strong set of both technical and professional skills. Team-based work is currently implemented with the assumption that students will instinctively develop teamwork skills through these experiences. Unfortunately, simply participating in team projects does not necessarily allow students to develop strong teamwork capabilities – it could even reinforce dysfunctional habits. In our experience, it is helpful to make students aware of which specific behaviours lead to effective teamwork. To help address this issue, a collaborative project between the Individual and Team Performance Lab (ITP) in psychology and the Schulich School of Engineering has resulted in the creation of evidence-based team and individual assessments and participative activities. In this workshop, participants will learn about ITP Metrics and how you can utilize our suite of tools to develop and track interpersonal and teamwork skills in your students, become familiar with the online assessment platform, learn how debrief the assessments through a participative activity, design an application of the tools for your own classroom/program and become aware of additional resources beyond what was covered in the workshop (e.g., debrief slides and activities for assessments; team contracts; communication training framework – SUIT).

Attendees can grab their name tag and welcome package in the foyer of the Bahen Centre as they arrive.

Dean Cristina Amon and Greg Evans

Rethinking Engineering Education

BA: 1200
Engineering Ecosystems and Communities: Education, Leadership, Entrepreneruship and Professional Practice

BA: 1210
Insights on Capstones from Aerospace Engineering

BA: 1220
1st Year Initiatives and Innovations

BA: 1240
Understanding Team Performance

BA: 1200
Education Practices and Methods: Leadership, Teamwork, and Engagement I

BA: 1210
Insights from Across the Academy

BA: 1220
Finetuning Teaching

BA: 1240
Supporting Online Learning

BA: 1200
Education Practices and Methods: Leadership, Teamwork, and Engagement II

BA: 1210
Taking Advantage of New Teaching Spaces and Opportunities

BA: 1220
Design from Abstract to Concrete

BA: 1240
Supporting Peer Learning

Attendees can grab their name tag and welcome package in the foyer of the Bahen Centre as they arrive.

Creating an Inclusive Engineering Landscape to Ensure Everyone Thrives

BA: 1200
Sharing Circle on Indigenous Engineering Education in Canada

BA: 1210
Improving Student Engagement and Experience

BA: 1220
Learning from/with Peers

“Predicting the unpredictable and preparing our students to meet it” is the focus of the grand finale of CEEA 2017.

This special keynote workshop is intended to provoke and inspire educational strategies so as to build a shared foundation for how we might equip future engineering students to meet the mid-century challenges of the volatile data age.