Recently, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded OSU a $1M grant on engineering education at the departmental implementation level. This project is led by Drs. Alan Cheville (ECEN, Associate Professor) and Charles Bunting (ECEN, Associate Professor) and involves faculty members from ECEN, College of Education, OSU Library, and collaborators from Michigan State University, University of Washington, and SUNY at Buffalo. This project will develop a coherent research and education program that is supported by a more effective, engaged, and efficient curriculum. To help students become engineers, this project will modify our current ECEN program to let students practice being engineers by transitioning from a knowledge-based program with passive learning to one that is development-based with active learning.

There are two immediate goals of this project. One is to increase the depth of student learning by restructuring ten courses in the ECEN program using a new developmental model, and the other is to engage both current and future faculty in integrating scholarship back into teaching. This project will build resources, communities, and partnerships to engage current and future faculty in curriculum reform. Both graduate and undergraduate students become involved in curriculum reform to prepare them for future roles as researchers, teachers, and scholars. Local and national partnerships will assess the impact of this project on student learning, and will allow faculty to broadly disseminate the results. The curricular changes are based on established educational techniques that are proven to engage and retain under-represented groups, particularly women. This project will cause a fundamental shift in the focus of an engineering degree by creating, assessing, and disseminating methods that let students develop as engineers.