Service-learning is a pedagogical approach which makes learning more meaningful. Researchers have reported this so far taking the cases of student learning experiences and impact studies. There are also studies which analyzed the role of community and academic institutions in the success of Service-learning. Faculty being an important stakeholder, less research took place on the role of faculty. When it is targeted to undergraduate students, Service-learning courses require to be designed and delivered in a distinctive style. Undergraduate students think and learn independently compared to children under 18 years of age. There are learning theories which are applicable for faculty and students. Faculty learning is equally important to make learning more effective. Faculty becoming co-learners while teaching increases the confidence of students in the learning process. As per the literature available, faculty learning as a specific area is not given focus in the process as compared to the other areas of service-learning like models of integrating service-learning into curriculum, benefits of service-learning, complementing professional skills and improved ethics etc. Hence this study is an attempt to explore the concept of faculty learning in service-learning and report the significance of faculty learning in implementing service-learning courses to undergraduate engineering students.

Learner engagement in digital or online learning has been identified as one of the many challenges and personalizing the digital learning content to keep students motivated and engaged throughout the duration of course is gaining much interest among academia. The purpose of this study is to identify the levels of student engagement and understand the relationship between learner engagement and their academic performance. This study has used k-means machine learning algorithm to identify the levels of student's engagement and tried to identify the relationship between the engagement metrics and student performance using correlation analysis. Based on students’ engagement metrics, k-mean algorithm classifies students in to two levels, namely High engaged students, and Low engaged students. The results of correlation analysis showed that there was a positive correlation between the engagement metrics and performance. Identifying the levels of student engagement possibly will help in personalizing the learning by recommending the e-content based on engagement metrics and identifying the relationship between the engagement metrics and performance might help faculty to design activities and content for the courses.

This full “research” paper presents the results of a systematic literature review that investigates the penetration of cooperative learning pedagogy in engineering education. The study considered 176 articles published between 2010 and 2020 from the google scholar database, of which 79 met the inclusion criteria. Despite the deep-rooted cooperative learning theory, results revealed that most records equated Cooperative Learning to teamwork, grouping strategies and collaborative learning. The remaining records span several engineering disciplines and focus on developing competencies at the lower levels of Bloom’s taxonomy, i.e., acquiring factual and conceptual knowledge among students. The records can be categorized into four broad themes: application of cooperative learning for knowledge acquisition, application of cooperative learning for knowledge application, i.e., problem-solving contexts, comparison of effectiveness between Cooperative Learning and other pedagogies, and development of a new framework by integrating cooperative learning principles and structures. This study ends with a set of questions to further the use of cooperative learning for engineering problem-solving.

There has been a growing call to nurture and prepare current engineering graduates to think and act ethically as the products designed by engineers have both individual and societal implications. Engineering ethics revolves around the professional obligation of engineers to society, their employers, and the profession. Engineering codes of ethics commonly referred to as fundamental cannons form the base for engineering ethics education. It focuses on micro ethical issues, fundamental overarching responsibility to protect human health, welfare, and the environment or promote sustainable development. Engineering ethics was introduced to first-year engineering students as part of a PBL based course, which was taught in a blended mode due to the disruptions caused by the COVID19 pandemic. This study attempts to assess students’ knowledge of engineering ethics and their ability to identify and resolve ethical dilemmas by applying the fundamental canons. When a module like engineering ethics was introduced to the first-year engineering students in a blended mode, it was essential to identify methods that would help assess students’ understanding of engineering ethics. Students learn the concepts of engineering ethics through asynchronous videos. The module’s primary objective was to develop students’ ability to identify and resolve ethical dilemmas and map fundamental cannon. A discussion forum was set up, allotting students with a case study that had an ethical dilemma used as an instrument to assess the students. The results discuss mainly the cognitive levels that the students have reached in resolving an ethical dilemma. The analysis also predicted the areas where students found it challenging to understand the concepts.

Unnat Bharat Abhiyan (UBA) is a national-level service-learning program launched by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in India that aims to support rural development through the active participation of Higher Education Institutions. Towards building service and community-based learning programs, researchers and practitioners worldwide have called for critical, mindful, ethical, and reciprocal partnerships to be created with communities by considering issues of power and privilege held by the higher education institutions. This study adopted a participatory development approach at a private engineering college in India to design a service-learning program under UBA. Twelve engineering and science faculty from multiple disciplines collaborated with two engineering education researchers to form a Community of Practice. As a critical outcome, the discussions in the CoP led to the formation of a quality framework containing core pillars, principles, and action guidelines for an engineering community-based learning program.

Research in Engineering education has been driving how we educate future engineers. Although it is a recognized field in several countries, it is yet to gain acceptance in India. There is ample evidence of its need, scope, and effectiveness seen from the growing number of conferences and publications in India; we still do not have well-established areas for investigation, especially at the authors’ institute, which has a flourishing ecosystem for educational innovations and research. Thus, the proposed study describes the development of a research agenda at an engineering education research centre at a private university in India. The research agenda was developed using participatory action research and was guided by the university’s vision for research, thematic analysis of research studies from 2010-2020, and interview with eight faculty members engaged in education research. The resulting research agenda comprises three research areas: Technology-Enhanced Learning, Problem-based Learning, and Discipline-based education research, along with a set of overarching research questions, which will pave the way for relevant, directed, sustained, and rigorous research in engineering education.

This work-in-progress research paper aims to integrate cooperative learning principles into the engineering design process. The context of the study is an interdisciplinary, design-experiences course at first-year undergraduate engineering in India. Under the Indian schooling systems, the incoming first-year engineering students do not have any prior practice in intensive and protracted problem-solving and team-based experiences. Thus, when these students encounter their first design-experiences course, we cannot assume that the students will be able to self-organize their learning, apply new knowledge to the problem-solving contexts and effectively function in teams while meeting the outcomes of design problem-solving. The proposed study investigates the research question: How does integrating cooperative learning principles during engineering design phases impact the problem solver's knowledge of teamwork and taskwork, team effectiveness and team performance? The objective of the proposed work is to integrate Cooperative learning principles during the initial tasks of problem-definition and information gathering and investigate its impact on students in terms of their teamwork knowledge, taskwork knowledge, team effectiveness and team performance. The study follows a quasi-experimental research design with an embedded qualitative strand. The core design of Convergent parallel design is embedded in experimental research design. The detailed methodology is described in this work.

The Work-in-progress paper discusses the faculty development model. The workplace problems for engineers in the 21st century demands interdisciplinary skills. To cater to the need, the educators need to make interventions for inculcating interdisciplinary skills among students. The challenge is that very limited focus is on preparing the faculty towards building interdisciplinary knowledge, skills and mentoring capabilities. The authors through this paper share an experience of deploying a faculty training model used for training the faculty towards mentoring interdisciplinary projects. The presented faculty development model is a result of the heuristic experience of four iterations and is organically evolved. The model was implemented in the context of a first-year engineering course titled Engineering Exploration. The course uses PBL pedagogy and every faculty, mentors a set of students to complete an interdisciplinary project. The nature of the projects in the course demands knowledge and skills from different domains to be applied at the mentioned stages. To mentor such interdisciplinary projects, faculty needs to be formally trained. However, in the literature authors found very limited architecture in the direction of standard frameworks and models that can be used to train the faculty towards interdisciplinary thinking and mentoring. The paper describes the evolved faculty training model consisting of four following phases where initial phases are focused on improving the technical skills among faculty members while the latter phase is focused on improving the mentoring skills.

This Research Category Full Paper explores the relationship between the demographic characteristics of students and their participation in an online forum. Online discussion forums have become widely used in undergraduate classrooms. They extend the learning space beyond the classroom and provide asynchronous opportunities for peer-to-peer collaborations. Past studies have suggested that online posting behavior plays a role in students' learning outcomes; however, the study of the demographic characteristics of students who do or do not participate in online discussions is limited. We address this research question here. We chose our demographic variables based on prior studies of students' general online behaviors, and therefore we compare gender, race/ethnicity and international status, as well as declared majors, with engagement in the online forum. The discussion forum provided a platform for the students to ask or answer their peers' questions about the course material and homework assignments. The setting for this study was a sophomore-level dynamics and vibrations class that incorporated active, blended, and collaborative learning strategies. We tracked an individual's posting behavior throughout a semester. Study participants were grouped by whether they posted to the discussion forum at least once, and the Chi-squared test of independence was used to determine the statistical significance of demographic differences across the participation groups. The data show that female students were significantly more likely to be involved in online discussions than their male counterparts. Also, White and Asian American students were overrepresented, and international and Hispanic students were underrepresented in the engaged group. Interestingly, students who were required to take this specific course as a graduation requirement do not show more engagement than those who took this class for general engineering credits. This work extends our knowledge of who uses online collaboration tools, and in the future, we will analyze the content of the engagement (posts and comments) and explore the influence of forum participation on the students' grades.

This paper presents a new model of mentoring engineering graduate students called faculty apprenticeship, which is aimed at helping prepare graduate students to become effective teachers. Engineering education scholars have pointed out that graduate school usually falls short in preparing engineering graduate students for a career as faculty. Moreover, graduate students lack deliberate opportunities to practice and gain genuine teaching experience. Students who are appointed as teaching assistants (TAs) do not always get opportunities to teach and are mostly restricted to supporting the instructor as necessary. With an increasing focus on developing strategies to better prepare graduate students for their teaching role in academia, we address this challenge through the model of faculty apprenticeship. The faculty apprentice approach was implemented in the school of engineering education at a large Midwestern university. In this paper, we present the rationale of the faculty apprentice approach, which is located within the conceptual frameworks of the mentoring and apprenticeship models. We look at the experiences of two professors and two graduate students who served as instructors and faculty apprentices respectively throughout several semesters. The data is collected in the form of reflections and is examined through a qualitative constructivist lens to inform engineering educators on the mutual benefits of this approach. The results that emerged from the combined experiences of faculty and students provide a reasonable argument on how the faculty apprentice approach benefits both faculty and students. The results also present the process involved in successfully running the model. We believe the faculty apprentice approach is compatible and complementary with current efforts being taken by engineering colleges towards professional development of graduate students. The intention of this paper is to spark interest among instructors and provide information to transfer this approach from engineering education to other engineering disciplines.

In recent years, there has been a call for Engineering Education to adopt innovative pedagogical techniques. One such innovation is Purdue University's Freeform environment for teaching undergraduate engineering courses. Freeform aims to enhance student learning with an Active, Blended, and Collaborative (ABC) learning environment. The majority of research into the Freeform environment thus far has focused on student outcomes and the tools Freeform uses rather than instructional practice [1-3]. However, with the growth of Freeform and other ABC environments, the lack of actionable feedback available to instructors about their role and practices is becoming increasingly apparent. Therefore, with the goal of building on the characterization of Freeform and ABC pedagogies in general, this paper presents a one-semester longitudinal analysis of two instructors and comparisons of their actions in this environment. The study concludes that these two instructors retain individuality in their pedagogical choices and adapt their instruction to the material presented while staying within the Freeform ABC ethos throughout the semester.