Working to improve engineering education in the developing world is rewarding, frustrating, challenging, maddening, surprising, and vitally important. It provides an unpredictable mix of successes and struggles. The authors have been engaged in an ongoing effort to start up, build and implement a civil engineering program at the new National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA) in Kabul, Afghanistan. NMAA, modeled on the US Military Academy at West Point, aspires to have a modern four-year western-style academic program that has a large math, science, and engineering component. The academy has gone from a vague idea in 2003 to graduating its first class in January 2009. Along the way there have been many successes, challenges, and struggles encountered by the U.S. advisors working in Afghanistan. There have also been many lessons learned that the authors believe will have a wider applicability to all efforts to improve the higher level educational systems in the developing world. This paper will discuss in detail the efforts that have been expended to bring NMAA to the point where it is and address the challenges that remain, with special emphasis on the engineering program. The authors will also address the implications of these lessons for the broader endeavor of educational capacity-building in the developing world. While each country and culture offers its own unique challenges and opportunities, we feel several lessons we learned have universal applicability. Among the topics discussed will be the use of face-to-face and distance mentoring, cultural and ethical challenges, faculty development, providing resources and equipment, and ensuring the continuity and sustainability of programs.
As first-year Instructors in the Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point, we are highly motivated, extremely dedicated, and welltrained teachers. Fresh from graduate school and the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Department's famous 6-week Instructor Summer Workshop, we were excited as our first semester started. We were eager to get into the classroom and lead our gifted students to academic victory. Our students, cadets who competed rigorously to come to our institution, are some of the brightest college students in the country. They have chosen engineering as their major and future profession. However, once the semester was underway we found that despite our training, motivation and effort, we still had students fail and perform poorly on exams. Why do dedicated, disciplined, and driven students who want to be engineers fail? Is our instruction not meeting these particular students' learning needs? Are the lessons built with proper attention to building student learning through the cognitive domain? Is it a lack of motivation caused by outside influences? Is it a result of another academic failure or tragedy that creates a cycle of poor performance? Are their study habits poor? Or, could it be that these students simply do not understand the material? This paper investigates the possible sources of failure of cadets enrolled in two introductory Civil Engineering courses that are taught by new instructors.
ABET requires that graduates of accredited institutions have "an ability to communicate effectively." The importance of effective communication of technical information is also addressed in the ASCE Body of Knowledge. How schools meet this outcome varies by institution but about half of the schools surveyed for this paper require a specific course on the subject. Constraints at the United States Military Academy (programs can not extend beyond four years and a very large core curriculum) make it impractical to require a technical communications course. In order to educate our graduates about this specific type of communication rather than simply have them "learn by doing" in their engineering courses, the Civil Engineering program now includes an introduction to technical writing in the first engineering course our students take. By using a number of short, focused reading assignments from a technical writing guide, several short memorandum assignments, and a complete laboratory report, students taking Fundamentals of Engineering Mechanics and Design now leave with one more fundamental-the ability to effectively communicate technical information. This paper discusses our experience of teaching technical writing in an existing introductory engineering course and includes feedback from students and instructors as well as some of our lessons learned.
For the past five years, the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado have helped to create, develop and build an undergraduate academic program at the National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA). One of the most successful parts of the program development has been the creation of the Civil Engineering core curriculum and major. The authors, all West Point engineering instructors involved with NMAA's civil engineering development, discovered many benefits from providing this academic assistance which improved their teaching abilities. While our original mission was focused on faculty, curriculum, and course development, we soon encountered numerous challenges that ultimately improved our educational skills. We quickly found ourselves deeply involved in department level planning and decision-making, complete laboratory setup and training, computer software setup and training, infrastructure assessment, faculty hiring, supply acquisition, and student development. Many of these critical, additional tasks were unfamiliar to us, since they are typically done by other senior administrators or by those in specialized jobs within our department. We were also challenged with ensuring NMAA instructors could adequately explain material to those for who English is a second language, convincing them that our advice was in the best interest of student learning, and continually making changes on the fly. This paper will detail the challenges we faced and investigate the correlation that exists between our unique experiences and our development as faculty members, stressing those things we brought back that have enhanced our teaching in the US. While our efforts were focused on one program, in one country, these lessons could be applied to any faculty members building educational programs elsewhere in the developing world. Creating a Civil Engineering Program in Afghanistan The National Military Academy of Afghanistan (NMAA) located in Kabul, Afghanistan, recently graduated its first class as a result of the combined efforts between US advisors and Afghan military leadership. 1 Its short history began in August 2003, when the Vice Dean for Education from the US Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, NY, went to Afghanistan and met with Afghan and US military officials to discuss starting a military academy. While Afghanistan has had military academies in the past, they were all modeled after Soviet institutions where there was only a military training emphasis. The NMAA model includes four pillars: academic, physical, military, and character-leadership development, all supported by a foundation of Islamic based morals and ethics. Graduates from NMAA would receive a four year undergraduate degree. This new institution would resemble West Point in many ways. The Afghan leadership envisioned this would be the way to prepare their future military leaders for the countless challenges their country faced. This institution was such a priority that in just two sh...
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