2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

During the current 4th industrial revolution, technology is changing at an ever increasing pace [1]. Thus, it is essential that engineering educators continually adopt and teach new engineering technologies to both keep their technologies relevant for graduates entering industry, as well as to model lifelong learning for their students. In fact, ABET requires faculty to teach relevant tools for modern engineering, as well as equip students with life-long learning skills [2]. However, the time restrictions on faculty are well documented [3 - 4] and can make learning new technologies difficult or impossible.

This poster summarizes the preliminary results of an NSF project funded through the Directorate for Engineering, Engineering Education and Centers. It builds on our research that identified potential interventions to promote faculty adoption of new engineering technologies. Participants at a workshop at the IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference were presented with those preliminary results and asked to brainstorm ways the interventions could be implemented on their campuses, barriers to their implementation, and methods to overcome those barriers. The workshop was designed to provide peer review of the research results to determine if they would be considered relevant for institutions beyond the original research focus. An additional workshop goal was to expand on the existing set of proposed interventions by gathering ideas from faculty at other institutions. In this manner, the workshop both confirmed and expanded our data. The poster and this accompanying paper will present results of that brainstorming and will include proposed methods for reducing time constraints on faculty, support structures for faculty technology adoption, and human resources to support learning of new technologies.