Course Content Available: Enrollment Key: C01

Effective Teaching; Cooperative Learning; Effective Faculty Development, Outcomes based education; Quality and Accreditation

Part I
EFFECTIVE COLLEGE TEACHING

This workshop provides tools and strategies for college professors to make their classes more effective.  Topics addressed include the following:

• How do students learn? How do teachers teach? What goes wrong in the process?
• How do I plan a course? What can I do in the first week to get it off to a good start?
• What do I need to do to be an effective lecturer?
• How can I get students actively involved in learning, even if there are 200 in the class?
• What is cooperative learning? What are inductive teaching methods (inquiry, problem-based learning,...) How well do they work? Why should I use them? 
• How can I assess learning and skill development? How can I design tests that are both rigorous and fair?
• What are common student problems and problem students? How can I deal with them?

The workshop has been given on campuses throughout the United States and in South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.  It has been exceptionally well received by the participants, despite the skepticism many engineering and science professors feel toward teaching workshops.  Of the 3929 participants who submitted evaluations since 1996, 80% gave the workshop the top rating of “Excellent,” 19% rated it “Good,” fewer than 1% rated it “Average,” and none rated it “Fair” or “Poor.”  The presenters received “Excellent” ratings from 88% of the participants, “Good” from 11%, and “Average” from fewer than 1%. 





Part II
OUTCOMES-BASED ENGINEERING EDUCATION

All engineering instructional programs in the United States seeking accreditation must satisfy the ABET Engineering Criteria, which requires them to equip their graduates with certain attributes (Outcomes 3a-3k) and demonstrate that they have done so using rigorous assessment methods.  Nations that are signatories of the Washington Accord must demonstrate that their accreditation requirements are essentially equivalent to those of ABET. For some of the attributes (e.g., ability to apply knowledge of mathematics and science and solve engineering problems), this requirement can be met with no special instruction and assessment beyond what engineering departments have always done, and for others (e.g., ability to design experiments and formulate engineering problems) some departures from traditional engineering course content may be required but assessment should be straightforward. Others attributes are somewhat fuzzy, however, (e.g., understanding of professional and ethical responsibility and ability to engage in lifelong learning), and no clear idea exists of how they should be assessed or what instructors must do to equip students with them.

This workshop outlines the basic concepts of the ABET Engineering Criteria and offers ideas for designing or redesigning engineering courses in a manner that addresses all eleven of the outcomes specified in ABET Criterion 3.  The following questions are addressed:

• What are educational objectives, program outcomes, and course learning objectives?
• What learning objectives map onto each of Outcomes 3a–3k? 
• What teaching methods effectively address the outcomes? 
• What assessment techniques can be used to determine whether or not the objectives and outcomes have been met?



Part III
DESIGNING AND PRESENTING EFFECTIVE
TEACHING WORKSHOPS IN TECHNICAL DISCIPLINES

As anyone who has attempted to present a seminar or workshop on teaching to faculty members in engineering, science, and mathematics knows, the participants at such programs may not all be warmly receptive.  Many may believe that subject knowledge is all that is needed to teach effectively, and they are quick to dismiss as irrelevant any material on pedagogy that they cannot immediately connect to their disciplines.

Presenting an effective teaching workshop to faculty in technical fields requires answering these questions:

 How can I design and promote a workshop that will attract substantial numbers of participants?
 How can I select content that is relevant to the learning interests and needs of the participants, especially when those interests and needs may vary and I cannot be sure in advance what they are?
 What can I do to make the workshop instructive and enjoyable?  How can I get the participants actively involved?  What mistakes should I avoid?
 What problems might arise before and during the workshop (logistical problems associated with scheduling and registration, time management, difficult participants, equipment failure, etc.)? How should I deal with them?

This workshop provides answers to all of these questions.



Richard M. Felder is Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University. He is coauthor of Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes (3rd  Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2005), which has been used as the text for the introductory chemical engineering course by most American chemical engineering departments and at many international institutions for more than two decades.  He has authored or coauthored over 300 papers on chemical process engineering and engineering education and presented hundreds of seminars, workshops, and short courses in both categories to industrial and research institutions and universities throughout the United States and abroad.  Since 1991 he has co-directed the National Effective Teaching Institute under the auspices of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

Dr. Felder received the B.Ch.E. degree from the City College of New York in 1962 and the Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 1966.  He worked for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell, England) and Brookhaven National Laboratory before joining the North Carolina State faculty in 1969, and has spent sabbatical semesters at the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, Smith College, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  His honors include the R.J. Reynolds Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research, and Extension, the AT&T Foundation Award for Excellence in Engineering Education, the Chemical Manufacturers Association National Catalyst Award, the ASEE Chester F. Carlson Award for innovation in engineering education, the AIChE Warren K. Lewis Award for contributions to Chemical Engineering Education, the ASEE Chemical Engineering Division Lifetime Achievement Award for Pedagogical Scholarship, and a number of national and regional awards for his publications on engineering education. Many of his publications can be found at <http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public>.

Rebecca Brent, Ed.D., is President of Education Designs, Inc., a consulting firm in Cary, North Carolina, and was formerly Associate Professor of Education at East Carolina University.  Her areas of expertise include teacher preparation, classroom organization and management, instructional planning, and incorporation of instructional technology in K-12 education.  She has published roughly 100 articles on those topics and on cooperative learning, uses of writing in undergraduate courses, classroom and computer-based simulations in teacher education, and the promotion of listening skills in students, and she has given several hundred seminars and workshops on campuses and at conferences around the world.  She is codirector of the National Effective Teaching Institute, which has been given annually since 1991 under the auspices of the American Society for Engineering Education.

Dr. Brent’s  academic degrees are from Millsaps College (B.A., 1978), Mississippi State University (M.Ed., 1981), and Auburn University (Ed.D., 1988).  Until December 1996 she was a tenured associate professor at East Carolina University, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in language arts, course and curriculum planning, and classroom organization and management.  She organized and directed Teachers Learning Collaboratively, a faculty group that studied effective teaching practices and promoted change and growth in university teaching.  She received the 1993-94 East Carolina Alumni Association Teaching Excellence Award and the 1990 Research Article Award from the Organization of Teacher Educators in Reading.

• Program Management: Ravindra MP
• Program Management: Kantha Reddy Muthangi
• Program Management: Sridhar N
• Program Management: Krishna Vedula PMT