This research WIP paper focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and their variations, which may include social justice. These concepts have evolved from a focus on compliance to a strategic-level effort by organizations, demonstrating their positive impact on overall performance. DEI are critical components of a healthy and successful organization. A systems design viewpoint of DEI recognizes that DEI is not just a program or initiative but is instead an ongoing process that must be integrated into all aspects of an organization, from its policies and practices to its culture and values. Integrating the topic into the curriculum has also received considerable attention from researchers, and it seems that it will also become a part of the ABET accreditation process. This paper will include a short literature review of the topic in academia and then focus on examining it from a systems design perspective. Applying this methodology, we will treat diversity and equity as a required “function” and identify appropriate “dependent” and “independent” inputs.

This research full paper describes how integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) in engineering education represents a transformative shift with profound implications. In this work, we outline the multifaceted impact of AI, emphasizing its benefits and potential misuse within the classroom, and extend to consider its broader societal implications. AI's introduction in engineering education signals a new era of personalized learning environments. Its capacity for analyzing vast data sets enables tailored educational experiences, addressing individual student needs with unprecedented precision. AI-driven tools can identify learning gaps and provide customized resources, optimizing the learning process. These advancements are not without pitfalls. A notable concern is the misuse of AI by students, such as leveraging AI to complete assignments unethically, which undermines learning objectives and academic integrity. Beyond the classroom, AI's influence on society, particularly in the labor market, is a double-edged sword. AI poses a threat to traditional job markets. Automation risks displacing a significant portion of the workforce, particularly in sectors reliant on routine tasks. We have emphasized the importance of a balanced approach, advocating for the responsible integration of AI in educational settings with human oversight to prevent unethical use, potential job displacement, and other societal impacts. We have also advocated for studying and designing new pedagogical approaches and courses that would integrate AI-based applications such as ChatGPT to enhance problem-solving and critical thinking among students.

SCRUM (Scrum) is a popular framework for developing and sustaining complex products. It is designed to be an agile methodology that emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and customer satisfaction. At its core, Scrum is built around the concept of a small, self-organizing team of people, known as a Scrum Team. This team works together to achieve a common goal, each member taking on a specific role and responsibility. In this paper, we propose a modified Scrum Team structure as a model for student teams in academic project environments. Our modification involves identifying specific roles within the team to provide more structure and align with industry practices. By doing this, we hope to help students better understand the importance of roles and responsibilities in project management and improve their project outcomes. The proposed approach involves providing a Scrum mapping for student teams of three and four members, with each member taking on a specific role based on Scrum principles. In our proposed approach, roles will rotate after each new assignment or a set number of times, giving students the opportunity to experience different roles and responsibilities within the team. We believe this approach will provide further exposure to the popular agile design approach and help students develop critical project management skills. We implemented our modified approach in a computer engineering course with lab components focused on microcontrollers to test our modified approach. Our experience using this approach was positive, with students reporting a greater understanding of project management concepts and improved project outcomes. Finally, we believe that our modified Scrum Team structure will also aid in the assessment of ABET's student outcome 5, which focuses on teamwork, communication, and project management. By providing a clear framework for project management and emphasizing the importance of roles and responsibilities within the team, we hope to help students develop the skills they need to succeed in their future careers.

This Research-to-Practice Full-Paper attempts to provide a quantitative method to measure a curriculum's inherent innovation and entrepreneurship through available assessment data. This paper builds on our previous works relating systems thinking and design methodology to innovation and entrepreneurship. In this work, we try to reduce the complexity associated with innovation by presenting it as a function of "innovativeness" characteristics. This approach will use the student outcome assessment data compiled for the ABET accreditation process and obtain a measure of the innovativeness and entrepreneurship of the curriculum. The proposed scheme also reveals the usefulness of the data beyond the accreditation process. Given the nature of the collected data, the proposed approach cannot be used to compare programs, and it is only a self-assessment indicator. The paper contains examples that show complete innovation and entrepreneurship calculations for an engineering program. Institutions can use the proposed approach to further assess their curriculum's effectiveness and identify the necessary changes to advance innovation and entrepreneurship.

This Research-to-Practice, Work in Progress paper attempts to provide a quantitative method to measure the innovativeness and entrepreneurship feature of a curriculum through available assessment data. This paper builds on our previous works relating systems thinking and design methodology to innovation and entrepreneurship. In this work, we propose an approach based on using the ABET's assessment process to obtain a measure for the innovativeness and entrepreneurship of the curriculum. We have used the engineering innovator characteristics as the base for our calculation. The proposed scheme also reveals the usefulness of the combined student outcomes assessment data. Given the nature of the collected data, it cannot be used as a wayof comparing with other programs, and it is only a self-assessment indicator.

Online teaching has imposed great challenges for student engagement during the pandemic. Building a virtual classroom with active student participation is our approach to address some of the concerns and make online learning more effective. In this paper, Microsoft Teams is introduced as a virtual study room with many virtual tables (channels), where each table (channel) serves as an integrated platform for group meetings. Within MS Teams, Learner-learner interaction is boosted by virtual meetings, group poster boards, the “mention” function, and emojis. By integrating MS Teams with Zoom meetings, we can offer a zero blackout, fully interactive learning environment. The paper includes a detailed description of the required technologies for such a delivery, time requirements for the design and delivery of such an approach, and faculty assessment and perspective of the methodology. Finally, a summary of the advantages, disadvantages, and student feedback is included in the paper.

In this Research-to-Practice, Work in Progress paper, we examine the benefits of teaching systems thinking in an engineering curriculum. The call to include systems thinking and systems engineering courses as part of general engineering curriculum has received an increased amount of attention during the past few years. The need to improve the skills of all engineering students to help them deal with realistic, unbounded and complex problems, in a multidisciplinary environment that would produce viable and robust solutions, along with new ABET criteria has also helped this call. In this paper, we present supporting arguments to include one or more courses in systems thinking and engineering systems design as part of an engineering curriculum. This is done by identifying key common requirements between innovation and systems thinking. Including these courses will enhance professional skills and directly impact several “student outcomes” requirement under ABET. We also argue that these courses will positively impact and enhance innovation and entrepreneurship abilities.

This Research to Practice, Work in Progress, paper explores the relationship between entrepreneurship, innovation, and systems thinking, through examining the published work in these areas, and how innovation can be incorporated as part of an engineering curriculum. We identify key common requirements between innovation and systems thinking and propose the idea of teaching systems thinking as a way to promote and enhance innovation, and teaching design process as a practical way to introduce and inspire systems thinking in an engineering curriculum.

Many institutions are offering online courses, as part of their regular schedule, to provide more flexible course offerings to students with the hope of some cost savings in the end. In this paper, we will focus on examining some of the students' ratings and comments that have been reported in student rating of teaching effectiveness (SRTE) surveys, for an online introductory programming course, during the past few years. We will look at the issues that we have identified to play a role in the SRTE surveys of our online course and examine the teaching from several different perspectives that include effectiveness/appropriateness of online courses for students. The paper includes a set of specific and general recommendations to address the legitimate students' concerns that, we believe, would make the course delivery more effective and enjoyable for students.

The usefulness of online and hybrid delivery methods in education has long been realized and with the advancement of computer and communication technologies and the Web based authoring tools, their effectiveness have been further extended. We are at a point that online and hybrid course offerings for undergraduates are quickly becoming an integrated and regular part of engineering departments' course offerings. Many institutions are offering online courses, as part of their regular schedule. In this paper, based on our experience that started with hybrid delivery and ultimately extended to a full online offering, we will present a set of recommended steps that can be used as a guide by those who are interested in designing an online introductory computer-programming course. We will then present a set of observations that we feel needs to be considered and discussed by the research community. The paper will include examples of students' comments, which were received in teaching evaluations, for hybrid and online offerings.

This paper describes our continuous effort to implement a flipped classroom approach to teach an Electric Circuits course. The main motivation behind adopting this approach is to allow more time for in-class problem solving and, therefore, improving students' problem solving skills. Prior to each scheduled class meeting, students are asked to watch a recorded short lecture, which covers the topics in detail and includes simple worked out problems. Students are also encouraged to watch our narrated dynamically worked-out problems. These recorded worked-out problems are intended to complement the recorded lectures and help students with their problem solving skills. A typical lecture consists of a quick review of the concepts followed by solving more challenging problems related to the lecture material. A more detailed discussion of this approach and the advantages and disadvantages of such a scheme are presented. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approach, during the past two years, have been encouraging.

This paper describes our initial effort to develop a first year seminar for electrical engineering students at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran. This course was recently added to the curriculum and taught, for the first time, during the spring 2014 semester. The main goal is to motivate electrical engineering freshmen students by exposing them to an academic experience that combines fundamental concepts of engineering design, practical experience, problem solving skills, management and communication skills, and teamwork. This course was developed through collaborations with a colleague at Pennsylvania State University. A more detailed description of the course including discussion and students' reaction will be provided at the conference.

This paper describes our initial effort to implement a flipped classroom approach to teach an Electric Circuits course. Prior to each scheduled class meeting, students are required to watch a recorded short lecture, which covers the topics in details and includes simple worked out problems. We have used Tablet PC in combination with PowerPoint, OneNote, and Camtasia as the capturing software, to produce the short-recorded lectures. We have also produced a set of narrated dynamically worked-out problems, with different difficulty levels that students are encouraged to watch. These recorded worked-out problems will complement the recorded lectures and help students with their problem solving skills. A typical lecture consists of a quick review of the concepts followed by solving more challenging problems, related to the lecture material. A more detailed discussion of this approach and the advantages and disadvantages of such a scheme are presented. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approach by a group of students have been encouraging.

The usefulness of hybrid delivery in education has long been realized, and with the advancement of computer and communication technologies and the introduction of Web-based authoring tools, its effectiveness has been further extended. In this regard, it has affected traditional distance learning by transforming the learning experience from a static videotape delivery to a more dynamic format by adding/substituting the web as the delivery media. In this paper, we report our initial results based on offering an introductory computer programming course for engineers using Matlab; via hybrid e-learning including virtual face-to-face, for distance course delivery. We present the challenges that teaching a programming course brings about using a hybrid methodology with synchronous online delivery component. Details of this work, including design and delivery issues, student and course assessment, and required technology, as applied to a computer programming course, are included in the paper.

This paper describes our continued work in creating a set of narrated dynamically worked-out problems and the team based in-class problem solving for the Electric Circuits students to improve their problem-solving skills by understanding the key concepts and the way that they should be utilized in solving circuits' problems. The dynamically worked out problems, consists of problem solution annotated with auditory explanations, which students can watch and listen to. The in-class team based problem solving includes students working together, in teams of two, to solve problems that are presented during the lecture and are related to the recorded worked-out problems. The preliminary evaluations of the proposed approach by a group of students and faculty have been very encouraging.

The usefulness of hybrid delivery in education has long been realized. With the advancement of computer and communication technologies and the introduction of Web-based authoring tools, its effectiveness has been further extended. In this regard, it has affected traditional distance-learning by transforming it from a static videotape delivery to a more dynamic format by adding/substituting the web as the delivery media. Our focus in this paper is the use of hybrid e-learning with a virtual face-to-face component for distance course delivery. We believe that hybrid e-learning, in conjunction with a synchronous online delivery, can minimize the negatives that are sometimes associated with more traditional, primarily asynchronous distance learning offerings. Details of this work, including design and delivery issues, student and course assessment, and required technology, as applied to a computer programming course, are included in the paper.

In this work, we report our results based on an innovative approach that we started three years ago for delivering an introductory computer science course. The teaching approach consisted of team teaching, hybrid delivery, recorded lecture retrieval capability, readiness assessment activities, post assessment activities, objective assessment of student progress, and cooperative learning through team work. The new aspects of this approach were team teaching, objective assessment to provide additional feedback to students, and the combination of the aforementioned tools. Details of this work, including its advantages, disadvantages, student feedback, and lessons learned, are included.