Our Mission

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Expanding and sustaining research capacity in engineering and technology education, while building on successful programs for faculty and graduate students [NSF DUE 0817461]

This project addresses the continued need for developing engineering education researchers by leveraging the success of past programs and the expertise gained by various project team members, many of whom are participating in this site.

This project has three goals:

1. Design and deliver a new generation of programs to educate engineering and engineering technology faculty and graduate students to conduct and use educational research which are effective, flexible, inclusive, and sustainable after funding ends.
2. Foster a virtual community of engineering and engineering technology education researchers through the use of Purdue nanoHUB-based technology.
3. Conduct evaluation on the impact of these programs on individuals who participate and on the participants' students and institutions.

The proposed project will focus on three areas of the CCLI cyclic model:

• Creating Materials:New educational materials for engineering and engineering technology faculty will be created in during the development of three programs: Short courses in engineering education research, workshops for curriculum developers, and workshops in How People Learn Engineering. These materials will be made available on site in hardcopy to participants of the respective programs and on the newly created cleerhub.org.
• Developing Faculty Expertise: This project continues and expands the work started by projects such as the CCLI-ND funded Rigorous Research in Engineering Education and provides opportunities for engineering and engineering technology faculty and graduate students to learn how to conduct rigorous educational research and use the results of research to develop evidence-based curriculum.
• Conducting Research on Undergraduate STEM: The "Scholarship on Impact" element of this project will research the impact of participation on faculty’s thinking about student learning, and on their teaching.

The intended result of this project is to better equip engineering and engineering technology faculty and future faculty (graduate students) to conduct and use educational research to transform the engineering education experience.

The activities of this project will (1) contribute to the creation of the new discipline of engineering education research and (2) engage in a new form of inquiry, "scholarship on impact", which will investigate the impact of these programs on the conceptions of individual participants and on their institutions. Outcomes of this research can contribute to theories of impact (infrastructure, pathways, metrics, challenges and strategies, change agents and epistemologies) and make visible types of impact that may be crucial to long-term sustainability of educational improvements.

Join Us

Create your own account so that you can upload your own educational resources and become a contributor to the site. Post events on our community calendar, or ask a question in our community forum, and let the community help you out.