Several universities offer courses that engage undergraduate students in research experiences, in which students work on a research problem that usually culminates in a report or a peer-reviewed publication. While students are the immediate beneficiaries, faculty members find such courses very challenging as they need to balance multiple demands on their time. Often, the absence of a structured approach in such courses renders the semester or year-long course less effective. The proposed work captures the challenges that faculty members face based on which the course is redesigned using a three-dimensional framework that focuses on intellectual support, emotional support and professional socialization. Unlike most research courses, this focuses on research problems in engineering education. A cohort of students is initiated into the research process in a structured manner with timely workshops on the phases of research, cohort-mode of learning, and collaborative mentoring. A qualitative evaluation of the offering is conducted by administering a survey on the impact of the interventions, experience of cohort-mode of research, faculty-team mentoring’s effectiveness, and the enduring outcomes and influence on placement and higher studies. The benefits perceived by the students are beyond the intended outcomes of technical and domain knowledge and skills and are discussed in this article thematically.

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.

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.

Teamwork in engineering is well established as a critical skill for professional success and growth. Engineering education has included several interventions to develop teamwork skills from as early as first-year undergraduate engineering education. The proposed research full paper aims to take a step back to identify the nature of team-based experiences that undergraduate engineering students have during their secondary school learning and whether they equip them for the intensive, team-based, problem-solving experiences in their first year of engineering education. This study focuses on the student's perspective only and follows a convergent-parallel mixed methods design. It is conducted in a first-year, interdisciplinary design experiences course at a private undergraduate engineering university in India. The participants are 319 first-year engineering students. Data was collected through a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Results revealed that, although school education provides several team-based learning experiences, they do not equip students with teamwork skills necessary for effective functioning in their design teams.

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 current wprk in progress paper discusses the peer mentoring program. This program provides dedicated mentoring support for first-year engineering students in Project-Based Learning (PBL) course titled “Engineering Exploration” at KLE Technological University, India. The course focuses both on the process and the output. In this course, students solve interdisciplinary design problems by following an engineering design process. They develop a mechatronic prototype as a solution to the given design problem. During the problem-solving process, the students face several challenges which generally begin during the concept design phase and increase exponentially during the physical implementation phase or prototype building phase. Students generally work on their team-based projects after college hours in a dedicated prototyping area called the Thinkering lab. More than 275 interdisciplinary projects are done by over 1100 students every year. Fifteen faculty members and three instructors find it extremely challenging to cater to this huge demand, especially during the prototype building phase. Hence, students need a support system in tools and equipment, services, and mentoring to complete their design projects on time while attaining the intended learning outcomes. The peer mentoring program called Mentors In ThinkeRing lAb (MITRA), after conducting a pilot run in a semester, was introduced formally in 2017. In this paper, we present a well-developed, sophisticated, and methodical version of the program, its challenges, evaluation, and results. Here, we describe the peer mentoring program's process: call-for the program, induction, screening, immersive training and deployment of the mentors, program monitoring, and celebration of their success. The program was evaluated by analyzing its impact on stakeholders: mentors, mentees, and faculty members. Five faculty members each with experience of more than three years in teaching engineering exploration course and seventeen mentors (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) were involved in the study. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis.

This work-in-progress paper documents the transition of an undergraduate engineering university from in-person, lecture-based instruction to a blended model. The proposed work describes the planning, training, technology deployment, review, and monitoring of the blended learning model. In this process, the faculty were empowered to create content, practice studio etiquettes, edit videos, upload content to a streaming server, and create the courses in Learning Management System (LMS). The qualitative evaluation of this initiative was conducted from a pedagogical perspective using the research question: What challenges are faced by faculty members while transitioning from in-person learning to blended learning in undergraduate engineering education? Thematic analysis of the transcribed data revealed that challenges could be categorized as technical, pedagogical, multiple demanding roles, and nature of courses which further open up opportunities for evidence-based interventions.