The COVID-19 pandemic public health measures caused a shift to fully online teaching and learning with minimal lead time two-thirds of the way through a 13 week term. Students and instructors pivoted from blended with face-to-face instruction to fully online learning over a weekend. Our team- and project-based chemical engineering design courses include final reports, final exams, and oral assessments that all required reformatting to support student achievement and assessment of learning outcomes in a fully online environment. The instructors had significant experience with blended learning and developing communities of practice in these courses, but the rapid pivot to fully online learning and other measures taken by the university in response to the pandemic presented unique challenges for students, instructors, and the external members of the community of practice. In this contribution, I reflect on how well we met the challenges of rebuilding our community of practice online and how we preserved both the quality of our students’ learning experience and academic achievement following a transition to remote meetings, remote exams, remote teaching, and remote teamwork.

-

– To encourage innovation and positive team behavior, a bonus innovation assignment is included at the start of the introductory design course. Students are encouraged to choose from a reading list and insert themselves in the material to explore how leadership, creativity, and innovation might impact their design team experience. Students are then introduced to CATME and asked to evaluate themselves and their team members on a monthly basis as they work on lab assignments and project work in a cooperative learning environment. Capstone and introductory design students assess their individual skills relative to the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) graduate attributes (GA) pre and post course, including teamwork skills. In addition, capstone student design teams use reflection to self-assess team function based on their perceived attainment of team level, and confidence in their ability to perform categorized skills related to team performance, technical performance, planning and logistics performance. The goals of these changes are to provide a collaborative framework for students to construct activities to learn and develop innovation, team, and leadership skills. This report focuses on the structure of the cooperative learning framework and the development of five cooperative learning criteria: positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, appropriate use of interpersonal skills, and regular assessment of group functioning. Assignment effectiveness is demonstrated.

In this paper we explore building the engineering mindset from the perspective of developing exceptional leadership and management competencies to guide and support the traditional technical competencies that are the primary focus of undergraduate engineering programs.  A knowledge base for engineering, science, and design is developed throughout most engineering programs. Math and science are carefully scaffolded from first year engineering to ensure technical competence by graduation. We ask the questions: “How are leadership and management related to engineering work and design?” and “Can we develop a framework to guide the development of leadership and management skills in the engineering curriculum?” We argue leadership and management are integral to the engineering mindset and necessary to address the complex engineering problems society faces.  There is discord between the responsibility of the engineer and the decision-making authority for engineering projects.  This dissonance often results in engineers being technically accountable for their designs yet lacking the authority to make decisions with respect to the construction, commissioning, and operation of their designs.  To address this gap, we suggest leadership and management training be carefully scaffolded in the same manner that technical competence has been stewarded in engineering programs and propose a framework to do so.

No abstract