On the use of outcomes to connect students to an engineering identity, culture, and community

Abstract

Change is hard, a truism that can be highlighted in engineering education in many ways. The momentum of engineering education in traditional forms, and even the experiences of people in professional careers, is hard to shift, but many have tried.1 One can argue that the shift to ABET's EC2000 outcomes-based assessment was meant to serve as a change agent, but after a decade of implementation, engineering education looked pretty much the same. Small changes in programs sometimes stuck, and sometimes programs faded back to the way they were before any interventions were attempted. With the idea that maybe things could be different, that maybe change could last, a group of engineering educators got together to imagine what an engineering program could look like if the traditional constraints did not matter, only the outcomes. The product of this creative work is Iron Range Engineering, a program designed to develop students who meet all of the outcomes defined in Criterion 3,2 but have a different learning experience. Iron Range Engineering (IRE) is a project-based learning program that uses the outcomes to help students know when they are being engineers. This paper will tell the story of how the ABET outcomes have been and are used to drive innovative change in engineering education. It will tell the story of how they affect our students and our graduates, supporting and reinforcing their sense of identity as engineers, creating a culture that encourages the ongoing development of engineers and connecting them to a local, national, and international community where they can persist in engineering careers. The paper is organized around motivating concepts, supported by Schein's model of organizational culture, where artifacts that represent actions are the visible level, the next is espoused values, and the third level is assumed values or basic underlying assumptions, and can be represented by beliefs and identity.3 Ultimately, the outcomes we aim to meet, shown through artifacts, represent the values we hold as a community. Creating a culture that represents these values and supports meeting outcomes can best be done intentionally, and is monitored through a continuous improvement process. These support the development of an engineering identity and the process of students growing and developing into members of the community, whether defined as the academic or professional community. The context of this paper and its reflection on the use of outcomes to design and operate an engineering program is the proposal for significant changes in the ABET criteria. Discussions amongst the ASEE community have included webinars, a virtual conference, and a town hall meeting at the 2016 ASEE conference.4 The goal of this paper is to provide an example of how outcomes have been used as a driver and motivator for innovative change in engineering education.