ABSTRACT

Higher education institutions strive to improve the opportunities and preparation they give to students, especially in crucial professional skills like communication, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Very often, today's engineering graduates possess exemplary technical skills for analysis and design, but need further development of professional skills. American competitiveness, national security, and leadership in innovation are at stake. This project identifies the academic department as an organization whose alignment with these goals needs to be improved. The modern imperative to add value to a mechanical engineering (ME) education -- by focusing more closely on professional skills -- stimulates critical self-examination of the ME department. This project connects organizational dynamics to student outcomes, inspiring changes in curriculum, the student experience, and most importantly the ways that students, staff, and faculty interact with each other. This is significant, because it is not currently known how an organizational model promotes or inhibits development of these professional skills in students. By remaking the organization to one based upon creativity and trust, using modern approaches to manage this change, this project orchestrates revolutionary change in student preparation for engineering careers.

This project engages the tools of engineering education research, ethnography, social network and content analysis, change management, and a new, experimental organization to manifest revolutionary change in how students are prepared for engineering careers. Revolutionary change simply cannot occur until two crucial facets of an academic organization are addressed: emotion and culture. Faculty, students, and staff hold deeply personal, emotionally driven beliefs about what higher education is - and should be. In turn, these beliefs shape the local culture within ME in both positive and negative ways. This project takes a systematic approach to revolutionize the ME department at Purdue by focusing on both engineering education research and culture/change research questions. The effort will answer critical research questions about engineering education and appropriate approaches to achieve professional outcomes at large scale. The vision emphasizes relationships, culture, and communication, along with undeniable technical prowess, as cornerstones of professional skills. The Engineering Dean has provided a strong institutional commitment to the project and its investigating team, which is a unique coalition of experts in engineering education research, change management, and cultural anthropology of technical organizations.

The faculty development plan engages Strategic Doing, a modern approach appropriate for the highly networked (not hierarchical) ME department organization. The connection to professional practice leverages several successful, on-going programs in ME for both domestic and international experiences. Scalability and adaptation are central elements of the faculty development plan, with special emphasis on assessing professional outcomes - at scale. Project reliance on research in engineering education is robust, with one of the members of the PI team holding a joint appointment between the ME department and Purdue's School of Engineering Education. The project engages a diverse group of experts in executing the work, and involves a scaling and adaptation plan that allows the revolution blueprint to be adopted and adapted by other interested institutions.

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