This Innovative Professional Practice paper reflects a work in progress. Many in engineering education are interested in the dual issues of how to support engineering education change and how to disseminate and share ideas that others can use on their quest to change. Toolkits are quickly emerging as a genre for sharing that addresses dissemination goals while also respecting the agency of those involved in change efforts. This paper describes a toolkit formation process that utilizes co-design. The toolkit is intended as a means of disseminating transferable activities in a major educational grant funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper includes traces of our efforts in deciding toolkit and co-design workshop contents, the challenges we experienced, and the decisions we made and remade. We anticipate this paper provides a case from which those interested in creating toolkits can gain inspiration. We also anticipate that our case can be used to seed a conversation about toolkit creation that centers on the goals, the steps, and the outcomes.

Will the change last? In higher education, many of us put considerable efforts into program, curriculum, and educational reforms that lead to reasonable improvement. With each reform comes the challenge of sustaining the change. How do we assess how, or even if, to make the change last? To the authors’ best knowledge, no validated model to guide such assessment exists. The authors propose one. Based on systemic study of our current and previous work on educational reform and the literature, we present a framework that assesses the sustainability of a program, curricular, or pedagogical change. In this special session, we will not only present this framework and demonstrate its usability in two different cases, but we also will guide attendees in applying this framework to assess the sustainability of their own changes. We will involve attendees in the design process of testing and further improving the framework to determine, "Will the change last?"

WIP: The Mechanical Engineering (ME) Department at Seattle University was awarded a 2017 NSF RED (Revolutionizing Engineering and Computer Science Departments) grant. This award provided the opportunity to create a program where students and faculty are immersed in a culture of doing engineering with practicing engineers that in turn fosters an identity of being an engineer. Of the many strategies implemented to support this goal, one significant curricular change was the creation of a new multi-year design course sequence. This set of three courses, the integrated design project (IDP) sequence, creates an annual curricular-driven opportunity for students to interact with each other and professional engineers in the context of an open-ended design project. These three courses are offered to all departmental first-, second-, and third-year students simultaneously during the spring quarter each year. Each course consists of design-focused classroom instruction tailored to that class year, and a term design project that is completed by teams of students drawn from all three class years. This structure provides students with regular design education, while also creating a curricular space for students across the department to interact with and learn from one of another in a meaningful way. This structure not only prepares students for their senior design experience, but also builds a sense of community and belonging in the department. Furthermore, to support the “engineering with engineers” vision, volunteer engineers from industry participate as consultants in the design project activities, giving students the opportunity to learn from professionals regularly throughout their entire four years in the program. This course sequence was offered for the first time in 2020, and while the global pandemic impacted the experience, the initial offering was by all accounts a success. This paper provides an overview of the motivation for the three IDP courses, their format, objectives, and specific implementation details, and a discussion of some of the lessons learned. These particulars provide other engineering departments with a roadmap for how to implement this type of a curricular experience in their own programs.

The Anonymous University Mechanical Engineering department was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to revolutionize its undergraduate program. The goal of the grant is to implement department wide changes that create a focus on doing engineering with engineers and fosters stronger engineering identities in students and faculty. One area of change is the program’s curriculum. This paper describes how the Electrical Engineering Fundamentals course was integrated into the Mechanical Engineering Instrumentation and Data Acquisition (DAQ) course with the goal of creating connections between electrical engineering concepts and applications in mechanical engineering. Design and implementation of this course sequence are presented. Assessment and evaluation methods are also discussed.