Tagliatela College Faculty Team and Dean Receive a Best Paper Award at the ASEE 2018 Annual Conference

A team of Tagliatela College of Engineering faculty and Dean Ron Harichandran won a Best Paper Award at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) 2018 Annual Conference in Salt Lake City Utah last summer. The team won 2nd Place in the Best Paper Category: Teaching - Entrepreneurship & Engineering Innovation Division.

Harichandran and engineering professors Maria-Isabel Carnasciali, Ph.D., Nadiye Erdil, Ph.D., Jean Nocito-Gobel, Ph.D., and Cheryl Li, Ph.D. researched and presented "Integrated e-Learning Modules for Developing an Entrepreneurial Mindset: Direct Assessment of Student Learning."

"Our goal was to try to assess the effectiveness of the 18 integrated e-learning modules we developed and are using to enhance the entrepreneurial mindset of engineering and computer science students," Harichandran says. "Through our outreach, about 75 faculty at 54 other universities and colleges have integrated these modules into their courses. We are pleased that our work is being recognized by the broader engineering community through this award."

Dr. Carnasciali says the team wanted to be able to quantify the outcomes. "Engineers and scientists believe in metrics," she says. "The Dean came up with a fantastic way to do that."

"We hope to confirm that our students are deriving significant benefit from the interventions we are putting in place."Ronald S. Harichandran, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE

At first, Harichandran says he puzzled over it. "One of the challenges in academic assessment is to come up with effective metrics that are concise and easy to grasp; something like the Dow Jones Index for quantifying the performance of the financial market. We needed to assess how well our students achieve entrepreneurially minded learning outcomes by completing courses with integrated e-learning modules and needed to do it concisely."

The ideas came to him in an "aha moment" at the KEEN Annual Conference in January 2018. He created three indices: the Module Specific Entrepreneurially Minded Learning (EML) Index that quantifies how well students achieve the learning outcomes through a single module, the Module Specific EML Effectiveness Index that quantifies how effectively instructors integrate modules into courses; and the Overall EML Index that quantifies how well students achieve the learning outcomes through all integrated e-learning modules they complete.

The final metrics will be reported in a paper the team will present this summer at the 2019 ASEE National Conference. "We hope to confirm that our students are deriving significant benefit from the interventions we are putting in place," Harichandran says.