Work in progress - The age of apathy: Reigniting engineering educating

The last several decades have seen great changes in education. Technology has altered both the way we teach and learn. Students today are cited as being no less inherently intelligent than their peers of the past but as being much less focused and much less capable of the inductive thinking required for innovation. The attitude has shifted from needing to understand the basics to relying on technological resources to provide the answers. The result is students who are able to solve problems more efficiently than 30 years ago but who lack the understanding necessary to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable findings. While faculty are finding fault in the unfocused student, students feel neglected by the faculty. As university priorities shift from education to innovation in pursuit of research funding, students suffer from inattentive professors. Between running a quality laboratory, applying for grants, and publishing papers, faculty have little time left to devote to the other portion of their job—teaching. This lack of time results in uninteresting lectures, unattended office hours, and a growing gap between students and instructors. As learning becomes less personal, interest and motivation fade, compounding the effect of any potential technologyinduced attention problems. Index Terms – faculty-student interactions, technology, tipping point ACKNOWLEDGING A PROBLEM Since Norman R. Augustine’s 2005 statement ―Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing American for a Brighter Economic Future‖ to Congress, there has been much talk about the need for more engineers in the United States in order to stay competitive with nations such as China and India [1]. While there is no question that the number of engineers annually produced in the United States does not compare well with these nations, there is also the pressing matter of quality to consider. This quality is defined by engineering education. The need for change in engineering education is not a new concept. In 2006, ABET reported on the results of its EC2000 initiative to implement a continuous improvement system for engineering education [2]. The new program resulted in an increased emphasis on active learning and professional skills; there was variable emphasis on teaching [2]. This potential lack of emphasis on teaching is cause for great concern. The purpose of this research is to document an apparent and understated problem in engineering education—the gap between faculty and students. The first step is simply recognizing and admitting that there is a problem, which comes from simple interactions with engineering faculty and students. The more difficult task is to characterize and specifically define the problem. As a graduate student, I have the unique privilege of being a confidante to both students and faculty, from which I have noticed the repetition of several complaints and arguments as to why the state of engineering education is in such disarray. It is these complaints, along with commitment to and value for engineering education, that are the motivation for this study to understand the state of faculty-student relationships.