Daily Archive for August 23rd, 2008

Engineering Education in Context

An interesting email I got today from Banu, head of our school in Drexel.

A few profs won a grant to study student-faculty interaction. A really clever idea and I sincerely hope they do get some valuable info.

I hope, however, that their results are not biased and more than a single university gets involved. Perhaps some place from west coast?

Well, here’s the info:

Dear Students, Colleagues and Friends,

It is my pleasure to announce that Drs. Donald McEachron, Research Professor and Associate Director in BIOMED (PI), Rami Seliktar, Professor and Vice Director in BIOMED (Co-PI), Elisabeth Papazoglou, Assistant Professor in BIOMED (Co-PI), Fred Allen, Assistant Professor in BIOMED (Co-PI), and Sheila Vaidya, Associate Professor in the School of Education (Co-PI), were awarded an NSF grant in the amount of $499,997 for  the period January 1, 2009 – December 31, 2011, for their project titled, “Engineering Education in Context: An Evidence Based Intervention System.” The project proposes to develop and implement a sustainable, scalable and transferable system to measure and analyze selected characteristics of students, instructors, courses and curricula to increase success in attaining student learning outcomes and engineering program objectives. The main goal is to develop, test and implement an IT-supported knowledge management system that allows users to obtain high quality, high resolution, statistically significant information with proper controls in order to decide which factors are the most critical and how and when they can be most impacted by intervention. Achieving this goal will go a long way in continuing to improve assessment of our curriculum and helping our School meet future ABET accreditation requirements.


Please join me in congratulating Drs. McEachron, Allen, Papazoglou, Seliktar and Vaidya for this outstanding project which will enhance our ability to continuously assess and improve our curriculum and to impact our students’ learning performance and retention.

Best regards,

Banu Onaral