Overview:

The RED team as part of the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Illinois had a primary objective to enable students to develop effective and impactful solutions that address critical societal concerns and balances individual needs for the 21^st century. To execute our mission, we proposed the following goals: 1) reorganize courses and faculty teaching efforts into needs-driven curriculum tracks, 2) translate medical assessment practices into engineering education contexts to unify the clinical experiences and curriculum tracks into a holistic curriculum, and 3) organize faculty into communities of practice (CoPs) to provide faculty development.

Intellectual Merit:

In response to national and local studies of employers, our department decided to radically transform the undergraduate curriculum in both content and delivery methods to better meet the need of employers. Our program conducted faculty surveys and interviews, student surveys, and employer surveys to determine key knowledge and skills that are a priority for our program. These evidence-driven processes help to facilitate discussion about curricular reform and how curricular modules and assessment spanning across the department can impact the department culture around education across all levels. Several courses were modified or introduced to address these gaps identified, such as an intro course that focused on grand challenge learning, a clinical immersion course, a bioengineering ecosystems course that focused on bioengineering careers, and a clinically integrated capstone experience across the bioengineering undergraduate and masters students with medical students on our campus. Additionally, benchmarking studies were published as a result of these data for other bioengineering programs to use and inform their curricula.

As a further evidence-based approach to faculty development needs, all faculty in the department were invited to participate in an interview related to teaching practices inventory. These results served as a quantifiable baseline for the teaching practices in the department. Building upon previous research, there has been a nationwide push for the adoption of research-based teaching practices in STEM classrooms. We conducted a verbal survey interview with engineering faculty, using a modified “Teaching Practices Inventory,” to determine the teaching practices that are actively utilized in their respective classrooms. Each faculty received individual feedback and advice related to his or her responses and collective data was used to determine where improvements can be made on a departmental level for a more productive teaching and learning experience.

After seeing the results of the inventory survey, we offered a workshop on common evidence-based teaching practices that faculty could try in the classes. The team also provided additional year-round faculty support on pedagogical training, teaching exercise development, and fluid communication and continuity among faculty throughout all levels of the curriculum, which is especially important considering that target skills and content are threaded longitudinally and coordinated throughout curriculum. Additionally, to foster sharing of course related materials developed, this project engaged all faculty in a human-centered design approach to building a curriculum repository that would allow for storing and sharing of course materials and notes.

Another mission was to align assessment and evaluation methods to support students’ identities as holistic engineers. Our department realized that collection of data from courses is cumbersome for faculty, so we are explored technology solutions to assist with the collection of course level data. Using commercially available systems, individual questions were tagged with concepts or skills for tracking and use in the assessment models for both program and individual student assessment tracking.  Use of these integrated tools and our tagging algorithm in our curriculum was instrumental to help us gather data in our move from cohort level program assessment to individual level competency assessment.   

Through several research projects, we were able to show that tag organized assessment data can be visualized to identify underrepresented learning goals in assessments for instructors to address. Faculty perceived tag-organized assessment as helpful to address important needs in the classroom, including improving feedback to students, accurately covering learning goals in assessments, communicating learning objectives to students, and driving self-regulated learning.

Throughout the change process, faculty, staff, and students participated in a justice survey to track changes in justice within the department as the project moved forward. Additionally, the surveys provided input on new ideas, proposals, and activities. These survey results were instrumental in guiding the research team and department leadership on incorporating faculty, staff, and student input, pacing change, and communicating change.

Broader Impacts:

The project produced many replicable products including the tag-organized assessment models, justice focused survey instrument used to minor changes in department culture and practice, and the benchmarking studies provided to the community as an outcome of the industry, faculty, and alumni surveys. Further, the approach of using assessment to gather data for evidence-based decision making and human-centered design approaches to design and implement a curriculum can be widely replicated and adopted. 

Last Modified: 08/01/2022
Modified by: Jennifer R Amos