2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Advancing the ASCE ExCEEd Teaching Workshop: A Multi-Year, Multi-Stage Evaluation Process and Implementation Plan

Presented at Civil Engineering Division (CIVIL) - ASCE Collaborations

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) started the Excellence in Civil Engineering Education (ExCEEd) program in 1998, which includes the ExCEEd Teaching Workshop (ETW) first offered in 1999. Since its inception, the ETW has been offered as a multi-day-long practicum, both as an in-person workshop over forty times and as a remote workshop three times (whereby the remote workshop was developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to be offered in the post-pandemic period). To date, the ETW has contributed toward the instructional skills development of about 1,200 engineering faculty, positively influencing the formation of the many civil engineering students they teach across the nation and globe. The landscape in higher education has evolved significantly since 1999 and while the ETW has undergone incremental change over the years, its core structure and content has not incorporated more significant changes taking place across engineering education. In short, there arose an appropriate need to critically examine, assess, and evaluate the ETW such that the workshop could best leverage emergent instructional strategies for teaching and learning that all civil engineering instructors can and ought to adopt in their classrooms.

As such, the ASCE Committee on Faculty Development (CFD) (which oversees the planning, development, execution, and continuous improvement of the ETW) took steps in 2019 to engage in a multi-year, multi-stage program evaluation process for the ETW, a project dubbed as Advancing the ExCEEd Teaching Workshop. In this effort, CFD recruited external evaluators who had extensive program assessment experiences from the broader engineering education community to conduct two successive, comprehensive program evaluations for the ETW in Summer 2021 and Summer 2022. To diminish confirmation bias in the evaluation efforts, CFD intentionally sought external evaluators who had no prior connection to CFD or the ETW. The evaluations of the ETW in Summer 2021 and Summer 2022 focused on identifying the ETW’s strengths and areas for improvement in topical coverage, schedule, means and process, content delivery, adoption, impact, and staff training. Based on those External Evaluation Reports, CFD prioritized strategic enhancements to be developed and refined by a working group made up of committee members and corresponding members. An initial suite of enhancements was identified and made for the Summer 2022 ETW while a more expansive suite of enhancements was incorporated for the Summer 2023 ETW.

This paper presents the outcomes of the overall program evaluation efforts, implementation of workshop changes, and an initial assessment of the changes made to the ETW as part of the Advancing the ExCEEd Teaching Workshop project. Specifically, this paper highlights how collective input from key stakeholders was facilitated to ensure community consensus on the workshop development. Additionally, this paper provides a preliminary assessment of the changes made to the Summer 2023 ETW as gauged through ETW participant responses to survey questions and through a qualitative analysis by the ETW staff. By sharing the process by which the ETW was reviewed and advanced, this paper seeks to contribute valuable information and insights with the civil engineering education community on how advances in engineering education have positively shaped the ETW, ensuring the workshop’s continued effectiveness and relevance within the broader landscape of higher education for many years to come.

Authors

Dr. Daniel Ivan Castaneda http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-8529-3815 James Madison University [biography]

Daniel I. Castaneda is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering at James Madison University. Daniel earned his PhD in 2016 and his Master's in 2010, both in civil engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He previously earned his Bachelor's in 2008 from the University of California, Berkeley. His course development includes civil engineering materials, concrete infrastructure, dynamics, engineering design, engineering economics, first-year engineering experience, matrix analysis, mechanics, probability and risk in engineering, statics, and structural analysis. His research aims to better society by exploring how infrastructure materials can be made to be more environmentally sustainable and resilient; and by exploring how engineering can be structured to be more welcoming of diverse perspectives, which can fuel solutions in challenging societal inequities.
Afeefa Rahman University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Casey J Rodgers http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6378-3386 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Patricia Clayton Wake Forest University [biography]

Patricia Clayton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering at Wake Forest University. They formerly served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering. Patricia's research interests include diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering education, alongside structural engineering and natural hazards engineering.
Mr. Dion Karean Coward [biography]

Dion K. Coward is the Manager of Educational Activities at the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Prof. Jacob Henschen University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [biography]

Professor Henschen completed his B.S., M.S., and PhD. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2007, 2009, and 2018 respectively. He was an Assistant Professor at Valparaiso University until he moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as a Teaching Assistant Professor in June 2020. He serves as the co-chair for the Teaching Methods and Education Materials Committee at ACI and the co-chair of the Committee on Faculty Development at ASCE.
Dr. Tanya Kunberger P.E. http://orcid.org/https://0009-0003-9407-7753 University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown [biography]

Dr. Kunberger is Division Chair for Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown.
Ms. Leslie Nolen American Society of Civil Engineers [biography]

Leslie Nolen, CAE, serves as director, educational activities for the American Society of Civil Engineers. She brings over 20 years of association management experience to her work with ASCE's Committee on Education on issues of importance to the undergraduate education of civil engineers.
Dr. Pinar Omur-Ozbek Colorado State University [biography]

Dr. Pinar Omur-Ozbek is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Colorado State University. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at Virginia Tech. Her research evolved from sensory analyses to medical and biomedical field to further study the effects of metal ions on the oral epithelial cells. During conducting sensory analyses she developed the first international odor standard to be adopted and used for Flavor Profile Analysis of drinking water.

Dr. Omur-Ozbek’s teaching interests include environmental engineering concepts, environmental chemistry, water quality analyses, ecological engineering and engineering ethics. Her research interests include drinking water quality and treatment, odorous and toxic algal blooms, impacts of toxins on crops and humans, impacts of wildfires and hydraulic fracking on surface water quality, and affected indoor air quality due to use of contaminated tap water.
Dr. Monica Palomo California State Polytechnic University, Pomona [biography]

Professor

B.S. Civil Engineering, University of Guanajuato, Gto, Mexico, December 1999, summa cum laude.

M.S. Civil Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, May 2003.

PhD. Civil Engineering, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS , May 2008.

Dr. Palomo is currently a Professor in the Civil Engineering Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). In this position, Dr. Palomo is responsible for teaching courses such as Introduction to Civil Engineering; Hydraulics; Water and Wastewater Treatment; Groundwater Mechanics; Research Experience of Undergraduate Students; and Engineering Outreach Service Learning courses, among others. She is also a faculty advisor for the California Water Environment Association (CWEA), and Engineers Without Boarders (EWB) student chapters. Additionally, Dr. Palomo is the CE Water Analysis laboratory director and coordinates all teaching, research and safety training activities in the engineering laboratory. Dr. Palomo conducts research in surface water quality improvement via natural treatment systems, water and wastewater treatment processes, and water education. She is involved in outreach programs for K-12 students to increase the participation of Hispanic female students in STEM fields
Carolyn M Rodak Union College
Dr. David A Saftner University of Minnesota Duluth [biography]

David Saftner is an Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth. He received a BS in Civil Engineering from the United States Military Academy and MS and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan.

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