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.

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.

The world has witnessed an unprecedented disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, temporarily halting various educational activities at educational institutes like universities, schools and colleges. Both educators and learners were forced to adapt to the new situation and continue to face the challenges, together. Hence many universities and colleges were compelled to move from the traditional method of teaching to the online method of delivering courses. Blended learning has been adopted to effectively deliver the courses online which comprises asynchronous and synchronous delivery. KLE Technological University turned this situation into an opportunity of beginning a new era of learning on campus, there was a strategic shift from traditional learning to blended learning. In this blended model, the student learned various courses in asynchronous mode through pre-recorded videos and study material on the Learning Management System (LMS). When the students learn in such an online learning environment, there comes a demand for learning accountability, hence there was a need to implement best assessment practices during asynchronous learning. The assessment method chosen was post-test, which was conducted to assess if the students had met their learning goals. This paper mainly focuses on conducting the post-test effectively and carrying out an extensive analysis of the student’s performance. To make sure students have understood the concepts well, the questions framed were of higher bloom’s level focusing on the different topic learning outcomes. An intervention was designed to create concept-wise questions mapped to bloom’s level and different outcome-based education parameters. Post-test results are collected using a tool called Dipstick integrated with the LMS. Through this tool different reports are generated that helps the course instructor to analyze the student’s depth of learning. The graphs generated through the Dipstick tool shows dips wherever a student lacks in understanding the concepts. The Dipstick report will help the course instructor in identifying and convincing the unclear concepts to the students by thinking in two dimensions, that of re-designing the content or by thinking of effective pedagogy to teach 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.

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.