RSVP 

Engineering education: leading the way through a decade of change

Ruth Graham, PhD 
RH Graham Consulting
Consultancy in Engineering and Entrepreneurship 
LInc Talk Overview: 
The transformation of engineering education has its roots in the decade before the COVID-19 pandemic. Engineering faculty and their institutional leaders across the world were driving forward changes in the engineering curriculum to ensure that tomorrow’s engineers have the competencies needed to tackle the economic, social and environmental challenges of the 21st century. But the pandemic has been an additional catalyst for change, necessitating major reforms to program design and delivery and the wider student experience. Together, these changes are set to have a major impact on the future trajectory of the engineering education sector. They have also shone a spotlight on how universities reward the contributions to teaching and learning made by faculty.

The talk will discuss findings from two global projects. The CEEDA project focuses on changes in engineering education resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the sudden pivot to online teaching and learning in spring 2020. It is looking in particular at whether this shift has set back or accelerated educational changes in train before 2020. The Teaching Cultures Survey is capturing global progress made in reforming academic promotion systems and rewarding faculty contributions to university teaching and learning. Evidence from both projects point to the capacity of engineering schools to spearhead and embrace far-reaching changes in higher education.

Biography: 

A Mechanical Engineer by training, Ruth Graham specialised in aeronautical fatigue, working with BAE SYSTEMS for a number of years. In the early 2000s, she moved to Imperial College London and later became Director of the EnVision project, which sought to transform the undergraduate education across all nine departments in the Faculty of Engineering and improve its culture of support and reward for teaching excellence.

Ruth has worked as an independent consultant since 2008. Her work is focused on fostering change in higher education across the world; helping to improve teaching and learning worldwide and supporting the emergence of technology-driven entrepreneurship within universities. Ruth’s recent projects of particular relevance to her talk include:

• a global study on the lessons learnt from the current period of ‘emergency teaching’ resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and how this might impact the trajectory of engineering education in the future (www.ceeda.org);
• a global initiative to improve the reward and recognition of teaching in higher education that is now supporting reform to the tenure and promotion systems of over 50 universities worldwide (www.advancingteaching.com);
• a cross-institutional and multi-year survey to capture and track the culture and status of teaching amongst faculty, in which 25 universities from 10 countries are participating (www.teachingcultures.com).

Further details can be found on Ruth’s website – www.rhgraham.org – which provides an outline of recent projects as well as copies of her published reports.