2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Advancing Student Perspectives through Bi-Institutional Hemispheric Collaboration in Humanitarian Engineering

Presented at Community Engagement Division 4 - Cultivating Engineering Excellence through Mentorship and Humanitarian Engineering

“ Advancing Student Perspectives Through Bi-institutional Hemispheric Collaboration in Humanitarian Engineering”

In 2017 Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver) in Denver, Colorado and the Universidad del Valle de Atemajac University (UNIVA) in Guadalajara, Mexico partnered to implement a short term, bi-lateral student exchange program focused on studies in Humanitarian Engineering. This initiative was funded by the 100K Strong for Americas Grant aimed to promote “Building institutional capacity, increasing student mobility within the Americas, and enhancing regional education cooperation”.

Humanitarian Engineering (HE) is a method of problem solving directed at cultivating the wellbeing of underserved people. It offers a platform to engage students in Service-Learning Activities.

This commencing international experience launched the establishment of a longer-term collaboration agreement between the two higher education institutions (HEIs) which evolved to include activities in COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning), and HE projects and courses.

This paper shares a course that was presented in two modalities though this cooperation with special attention paid to the outcomes as measured by a mixed methods survey and project evaluations. The learning outcomes are compared for a face-to face course and a COIL version of the same topic that engaged students in Humanitarian Engineering activities and are measured in three areas of: intercultural competencies, acquired Humanitarian Engineering and professional skills, and gained social consciousness. The outcomes from both courses are reported in this paper and show quantitatively that these two Humanitarian Engineering educational experiences provided a good forum to promote growth of skills in the aforementioned areas. The two modalities both showed growth, however, larger gains were witnessed in most of the categories for students who took part in the face-to-face course especially regarding students' perception in the areas of Intercultural competencies and gained social consciousness

Authors

Prof. Aaron Brown Metropolitan State University of Denver [biography]

1st author:
Aaron Brown is a professor and program director at Metropolitan State University of Denver in the Department of Engineering and Engineering Technology. He has directed much of his work towards a focus in the areas of Appropriate Design, Humanitarian Engineering and Humanitarian Technology. Dr. Brown has worked on projects that help marginalized or vulnerable people all over the globe in such locations as Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, India, China, Peru, and Nepal, often involving students in these activities. He also has taught seminars on best methodologies for humanitarian engineering projects in the U.S. as well as Mexico, India, Germany, Spain and Hungary.
Dr. Irma Livier De Regil Sanchez Universidad del Valle de Atemajac, Guadalajara, Mexico [biography]

Ph.D. in Administration Sciences in Universidad del Valle de Atemajac, Cum Laude. Thesis: Productive Integration Model for Community Development.
Master in Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Universidad de Salamanca and Universidad de Oviedo.
Master in Global Marketing from the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente
Degree in Graphic Design from the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara
Speaker, lecturer, collaborator in national and international research networks; thesis director and postgraduate professor in education and human development sciences; expert in research project design and new products development process. Researcher in "Community Development and Social Issues", she collaborated with Dr. Aaron Brown from Metropolitan State University of Denver, in the design of the "Humanitarian Engineering Program" and the “International Humanitarian Engineering Seminar” with an interdisciplinary approach. Is the Head of Research at UNIVA's Guadalajara campus and is a promoter of maturity and technology transfer processes and scientific-technological based entrepreneurship.

Download paper (959 KB)

Are you a researcher? Would you like to cite this paper? Visit the ASEE document repository at peer.asee.org for more tools and easy citations.

» Download paper

« View session