Tag / conference

by shannonchance

Why India? Inspired by IUCEE and KLE Tech

You might be asking yourself why I went to India at the start of the New Year. As you may recall, I served on the global Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN) for five years. During that time I chaired REEN’s governing body but before I started chairing I served on a sub-committee to recruit and select host/locations for our Research in Engineering Education Symposium (REES).

Hosts of REES 2024 (and the upcoming REES 2025 that will be in El Paso). Can you feel the energy?
IUCEE award winners for 2024. Sooooo many working in Idnad to improve engineering education!

REES is generally held every other year, and we go to locations around the globe. REES is a way to meet new people, extend our networks, practice new research skills, and share what we find as we research engineering education. The symposia help attendees learn about engineering education in new parts of the world and they help the community in each region where REES meets to gain momentum. REE Symposia help people entering the field of Engineering Education Research (EER) to meet people who have been doing EER longer.

Two of the main organizers of the conferences were Dr/Prof Vijayalakshmi M. (left) and Dr Preethi Baligar (right).
The sessions were very well attended!

REEN was held in Honolulu (2007), Davos (2008), Queensland Australia (2009), Madria (2011), Kuala Lumpur (2013), Dublin (2015), Bogotá (2017), Cape Town (2019), Perth (2021), and now Hubli, India (January 4-6, 2024).

The REEN.co website explains that “provides a forum to share, discuss, disseminate, and propagate high-quality research and best practices through the Global Engineering Education Research community.”

Networking with the lovely and energetic Dipanwita Chakravarty (KLE Architecture) while touring the engineering research building at KLE Tech.
Three past REEN chairs in one place! Teresa Hattingh, Shannon Chance, and Adam Carberry. Homero Murzi just took the role of chair on January 1, 2024.

REES 2024 was hosted by KLE Technological University (KLE Tech) in collaboration with the Indo-Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE). We met on KLE Tech’s B. V. Bhoomaraddi Campus in Vidyanagar, Hubballi, Karnataka, India.

We typically team up with the local national organization for engineering practitioners and/or engineering educators. KLE Tech staff are leaders of IUCEE and are leading the way in EER, research-based teaching, and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

IUCEE is doing great things in India! It’s vision is “is to improve the quality and global relevance of engineering education in India” and to do this it seeks “to build an ecosystem for transforming engineering education in India with the assistance of engineering education experts and industry from around the world” (https://iucee.org/). The organization’s website is chock full of information with a vast number of events and activities featured every week on its homepage. Wow!

When I was on the REES selection committee, three scholars from India who are active in IUCEE applied to host a Symposium. That excellent proposal came from Krishna Vedula, Gopal Joshi, and Sohum Sohoni who I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the years since we made that selection in 2018.

Sohum Sohoni at REES 2024.
Krishna Vedula there on the left, rallying the troops!

IUCEE was launched in 2007 and today the organization has members from all over India, as well as from the Indian diaspora (all those brave folks who left India to work, study and live elsewhere in the world), like Sohum, who teaches engineering in the USA. I don’t know how many members IUCEE has, but LinkedIn shows 847 followers. Ooops! Add one more! I’m following now, and so can you: https://www.linkedin.com/company/indo-universal-collaboration-for-engineering-education/?originalSubdomain=in

REES workshop activities — see my colleagues Dr Ed Berger and Dr Mikita Hari there in the center, engrossed in converesation.
IUCEE includes a showcase of student research.

REEN also has a LinkedIn group you can join (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8537067/), and you can also subscribe to get email updates from REEN (https://reen.co/subscribe/). My fabulous former boss currently runs the REEN website — shout out to John Mitchell at UCL, a truly great person to work with and for!

So, REEN selected India as a host and asked the applicants to send a member to our REEN team to help us all prepare for REES 2024. We scheduled the event for January when IUCEE’s annual conference falls.

Getting to Hubballi, Karnataka, India for the first time was no small feat, with complicated visa and flight arrangements. Thanks very much to Dr. Nithya Venkatesan, Assistant Director of International Relations at VIT Chennai for helping me arrange flights and some accommodations for my stay. Her help made my trip possible as I was truly overwhelmed.

The lovely KLE Tech auditorium building.
All the REES 2024 attendees. Imagine, IUCEE was even bigger!

But it was all worth the effort. It was so inspiring to meet the very energetic members of IUCEE, as REES overlapped their conference by one day. May IUCEE members stayed on for the REE Symposium and contributed to it in insightful ways.

I’ll tell you more about the happenings of REES 2024 in an upcoming blog. Thanks for reading along today to learn how I was inspired to travel to India for my first time.

Meals under the marquee with delicious food plus great ambiance.
Panel Discussion 2 on “Transitioning from Engineering to Engineering Education Research”.
Making so many new friends and colleagues, like Dr Soumya Narayanan form KLE Tech.
The awards ceremony for IUCEE. What enthusiasm and what beautiful dresses!
by shannonchance

Best Paper on Diversity and Inclusiveness

Today we received the Prof. Susanne Ihsen Award for Best Paper on Diversity and Inclusiveness!

I’m both delighted and surprised that our gender and diversity group’s work won this very high honor at the closing ceremony of SEFI, the European Society for Engineering Education, at its 2021 conference.

Before explaining what we did, I’d like to give special recognition to Dr. Inês Direito for leading this project, bringing our authoring team together, and helping ensure we got things done! It’s a pleasure watching you achieve new heights in your work as chair of the Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity Special Interest Group of SEFI!

Inês made a video introduction to the paper:

Here’s the abstract:

Significant efforts have been made to promote gender equality in higher education (HE) in Europe. Examples include the establishment of the Athena Swan Charter in the UK in 2005 and the 2019 launch of the Irène Curie Fellowship scheme by Eindhoven University of Technology. But which initiatives address broader diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) challenges in HE? And which are specifically focused on engineering education? This exploratory study aims to improve our understanding of the ways in which a set of European HE Institutions engaged in engineering education address DEI at an organisation level, and how this is communicated within the public domain. The analysis of online data provided by a purposive sample of institutions is guided by the following research questions (RQ): 1. How is DEI addressed and defined in institution-wide strategic frameworks? 2. How many institutions describe having an institution-wide DEI organization? 3. What specific policies around DEI are being developed, and what areas are mentioned, defined, and prioritized? 4. What structures and resources noted as part of their DEI activities are specific to engineering faculties and departments? 5. What engineering-specific DEI initiatives exist that are not available in the public domain or are not written in English? Our sample is composed of the host institutions of the authors of the paper, and represent different European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland, and the UK. The findings of this exploratory study will be used to inform the design of a large-scale survey to identify DEI practices across the SEFI community.

And the APA citation is:

Direito, I., Chance, S., Clemmensen, L., Craps, S., Economides, S., Isaac, S., Jolly, A-M., Truscott, F., & Wint, N. (2021). Diversity, equity, and inclusion in engineering education: an exploration of European higher education institutions’ strategic frameworks, resources, and initiatives. The 49th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI 2021), 13-16 September, Berlin, Germany.

You can download the paper here, because the full proceedings will not be posted online until October.

direito-et-al-2021-dei-in-engineering-educationDownload

Many thanks also to the members of Best Paper awards committees, who are tasked with reading many papers and attending all the related presentations. It’s a great deal of work and we appreciate the time and effort that these dedicated folks contribute!

by shannonchance

Globetrotting in Malaysia, India and China

I’ve been covering more ground these days than normal. In a typical year, I’d never have been able to take time away from teaching during the fall semester to attend so many conferences. But this year, everything is online.

This past Sunday, I was able to deliver a two-hour workshop in India and then record a keynote speech for a conference in China. I also recently spoke on a panel in Malaysia.

I have never been to any of these places, though I would truly love to go! Nevertheless, digital platforms have allowed me to be an active part of discussions all around the world.

China

Here’s a sneak peek at my keynote speech for the Chinese Society for Engineering Education’s 15th International Symposium on Science and Education Development Strategy.

The Symposium’s theme was “Innovation of Engineering Education System under Global Challenges”.

My presentation is titled Equipping STEM graduates for global challenges via design thinking.


The production quality isn’t flawless, but given that I had ZERO tech support, I am proud of the outcome. I tested various apps for superimposing video over the slides, selected one, and managed to produce this video. All. On. My. Own.

The folks in China are polishing it up now, and hopefully inserting captions. It will be formally presented at the conference in Hangzhou, China on December 10th, 2020.

India

Being asked to deliver a workshop for the Indo Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education (IUCEE), I invited two colleagues along to help. Inês Direito, Manish Malik, and I have conducted similar workshops in the past, and we built on that foundation. We developed our past work further for the workshop we delivered November 22th, 2020.

Ours was on component of a set of workshops to help people in India build research skills in engineering education.

We provided An introduction to literature reviews in Engineering Education.

Here’s a link to our slides, which we have assigned a CC-BY license so others are free to draw from our work as long as they cite us.

Alternatively, you can click any of these images to view the slide presentation.

Here’s an overview of the content:

You are welcome to download the journal article we analyzed in the workshop. You might also have interest in the systematic literature review (SLR) we published on grit.

Here’s a pic of one of our team’s workshop prep sessions:

Malaysia

I also got my colleagues involved when I was invited to serve on a panel in Malaysia. Actually, I was invited to serve on two panels for this conference, but one occurred 1-3 AM my time, and I decided to stick to the one held during daylight hours! After all, I was teaching here in Dublin on the same days as the conference.

The speakers from the Women in Engineering plenary are pictured above. They were absolutely amazing. Such inspiring leadership and fabulous work! The speakers were:

  • Rosmiwati Mohd-Mokhtar, USM, Malaysia 
  • Shannon Chance, Technological University Dublin, Ireland 
  • Anne Gardner, University of Technology Sydney, Australia 
  • Naadiya Moosajee, WomEng & WomHub Co-Founder, South Africa 
  • Siti Hamisah binti Tapsir, MOSTI, Malaysia 
  • Sharifah Zaida Nurlisha binti Syed Ibrahim, CEO, MMC Oil & Gas Engineering Sdn Bhd, Malaysia

This was part of the 8th Regional Conference in Engineering Education (RCEE). It was organized by the Centre for Engineering Education (CEE) and the Faculty of Engineering at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.

The overall conference was on “Engineering Education Leadership in an Uncertain World”.

I presented work by Bill Williams, Inês Direito, and myself on Middle Eastern women’s experiences of collaborative learning in engineering in Ireland. Here’s a link to a recent conference paper on the topic.

We have also written a blog on this which will soon be published by TU Dublin — stay tuned and I’ll share that once it’s out.

I got to attend several other day-time sessions at the conference, including the closing session, pictured above. The crowd was warm and enthusiastic. They were really interested in learning what women from Oman and Kuwait had told me about how engineering is practiced in their countries.

Global perspective

I’m delighted to have had these opportunities. Back in 2006, when I decided to earn a PhD in Higher Education, I had a goal to learn to see patterns at a global scale. I wanted to equip myself with the research skills to to affect change and to enable myself to move abroad for work.

Getting involved in the global Research in Engineering Education Network (REEN), and now serving as its Chair, has enabled me to connect with others in meaningful ways — to analyze the way we teach, study data on efficacy, publish research outcomes, and help improve engineering and architecture education.

In addition to learning some new skills in video capture and editing this past week, I also expanded my skills in Photoshop and created a new logo for REEN. The entire REEN Board gave feedback to improve the design, and I’m pleased to unveil it to you now:

by shannonchance

EER deadlines for ethics journal and SEFI

I’m posting a cheerful reminder to those interested in engineering education research that important deadlines are coming up for manuscripts on ethics and SEFI conference papers. These are great activities to get involved with!

Ethics journal

The first is for the AJEE special focus issue on ethics in engineering education and practice (due March 1). See the call for papers at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22054952.2019.1694301

SEFI 2020 conference

I downloaded this info on SEFI deadlines from https://www.conftool.com/sefi2020/index.php?page=submissions regarding Research Papers since this info only shows up after you’ve logged in, meaning that you might want to see it before setting up your profile. Most abstracts/proposals are due March 2. Other types of submissions are listed below, as well.  Find out more about the SEFI 2020 conference here.  

Research Paper – abstract

Research papers shall present original studies in the field of Engineering Education Research. Authors may follow the standards for good practices in EER. Please add the names of the authors in the relative fields and add the abstract in the text field. The text shall NOT contain the names of the authors neither references, in order to ensure a double-blind review process.Please do not upload any file at this stage of submission.When preparing your abstract, you are kindly asked to consider the review criteria on the conference website.You can upload a full paper after your abstract is accepted. Maximum length of abstract: 250 wordsDeadline: 2nd Mar 2020, 02:00:00am CET, Time left: 8 days 14 hoursChair contact: sefi2020@utwente.nl

Concept Paper – abstract

Short Paper – abstract

Workshop – proposal

FOR SEFI SIG: SEFI Working Group Workshop

FOR SEFI PROJECTS: SEFI Project Workshop

FOR SPONSORS: Sponsor Workshop

by shannonchance

Drawing Conclusions in Paris

Sketching in Luxembourg Gardens

Sketching in Luxembourg Gardens

Pam Eddy and I attended the World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology (WASET) International Conference on Higher Education yesterday. We each presented a paper. When the activities wound up, we headed out in different directions. Pam went to hear a lecture at UNESCO that she’s received a special invitation to attend and I went to study the architecture of Paris.

I sketched in the Luxembourg Gardens and in a church that I’d discovered two days before.

Pam and I met back up for dinner with Pam’s husband Dave. After dinner, we strolled through central Paris–discussing things we’d concluded about the city on our earlier explorations.

A discussion group at the conference, lead by Pam.
Luxembourg Gardens
The Pantheon in Paris… feels like Rome.
Sketching in St. Etinnene du Mont church
caratids
Shannon Dave Pam pre-dinner
Dave Pam Shannon dinner
book benches
Passage Vivian by night