Mission and Vision

The education mission of the Department of Engineering Education is to provide an excellent, accessible and inclusive education to our students in four different contexts:

• Graduate students aspiring to a career in engineering education
• Graduate students from other engineering fields who wish to learn and utilize research-proven education practices in the context of their chosen field
• Graduate and undergraduate students who are required or desire to learn effective technical communication
• Undergraduate students who are seeking a broader engineering science education or taking engineering courses that are required in multiple engineering departments

The research mission of the Department of Engineering Education is to create and disseminate new knowledge that is pertinent to the education of engineers.

The service mission of the Department of Engineering Education is to offer our expertise and capabilities for the betterment of education and educational opportunities for actual and potential engineers at the university, state and national levels.

The engineering education system in the United States succeeds in producing knowledgeable, competent and qualified engineers, but it could do so more effectively and efficiently. At the same time, the engineering education system in the U.S. fails to produce a diverse population of engineers at all degree levels; it must become fully inclusive so that the diversity in the engineering population matches the diversity in the general population.

Engineering education research has generated, and continues to amass, a wealth of knowledge that can address the shortcomings of the present U.S. engineering education system, but it is not happening at an acceptable rate. The propagation, scaling and translation of research findings in pedagogy, assessment, inclusiveness, etc. from research study scale to classroom practice appears to be the rate-determining step. Surprisingly, a relatively small research effort is focused upon the essential topic of engineering education research scaling and translation.

The vision of the Department of Engineering Education is to lead in both the discovery of research-proven educational innovations for engineering and the propagation, scaling and translation of those innovations to classroom practice. We believe that success in the propagation, scaling and translation of engineering education research to engineering classroom practice will result in a robust and adaptive U.S. engineering education system that efficiently and effectively yields a diverse population of more highly knowledgeable, competent and qualified engineers.