Help Design The Future of
Transportation Engineering Education!
What We Will Do?
We have designed a three day program in
which you will (1) learn about the latest ideas in transportation
engineering education, (2) address three important questions to help us
improve how we deliver transportation engineering education, and (3) learn how to improve
your teaching skills.
The questions that we will consider
are: (1) how do we map the learning
domain for transportation engineering, (2) how do we create active
learning environments for undergraduate transportation engineering
students, and (3) how
do we
develop collaborative tools for sharing transportation engineering curricular
materials?
You can also share your current work and
innovative ideas in transportation education
at a poster session.
How Will We Accomplish Our Work? The format of the
conference is designed to encourage participants to develop answers to
these three questions. A plenary session will be held in the morning
of June 22nd, with brief presentations on the state of the art and
current best practices in engineering education in general and
transportation education in particular. Working sessions will be
held in the afternoon of June 22nd and all day on June 23rd for
small groups to work on these three questions. We will publish a proceedings that summarizes the results of the discussions and the action
items that are identified by the working groups. On the third day,
June 24th, you can participate in a teaching workshop, sponsored by the
American Society of Civil Engineers.
Why Is This Important?
Nearly all of the
nation’s 224 civil engineering programs have one or two required
transportation courses as part of their undergraduate program. For
some civil engineering sub-disciplines, there is a logical sequence of
courses leading to the required sub-discipline junior level courses such
as geotechnical, materials, structures, and hydraulics. For
example, the sequence of courses from physics (kinematics), statics,
dynamics, and strength of materials lays a solid foundation for the
junior structures course. For other disciplines, however, the
logic and sequence is less clear or linked. One of these
sub-disciplines is transportation, particularly if, as in many programs,
the transportation course emphasizes traffic engineering. Often,
students arrive in the transportation course with no prior technical
experience in or knowledge of transportation, excepting their historical
experience as automobile drivers, bus riders, walkers, and biker riders.
The course is often viewed as (1) not connected to their previous
courses, (2) too simplistic, (3) not technically challenging, and (4)
not relevant to their career goals or interests.
Instructors who teach
this course have their own set of complaints: (1) textbooks are too
simplistic in their approach or content, (2) there is a lack of real
world problems and information about complex problems and case studies,
(3) there is no laboratory time or facilities for laboratory work, (4)
there is a lack of connection to previous civil engineering courses that
students have taken or their engineering or science prerequisites, (5)
it’s difficult to use the course as a recruitment tool for advanced
elective courses or graduate study, and (6) the course is usually not
multimodal in nature. These collectively often show up as a lack
of student interest in transportation engineering.
Given needs in both
workforce and academia, there is both a need and opportunity to bring
together university faculty and transportation professionals to focus on
the undergraduate transportation engineering program and to identify
ways in which it can be collectively improved.
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