Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Olin takes lead with partnerships aimed at new engineering approaches

By Rodney H. Brown

When the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering opened in Needham in 2002, it was clear that it was doing things differently than other engineering schools. But for the first handful of years, most of the focus was on how different its student financing structure was — the entire initial student body got their full four years paid for.

Since then Olin has dropped that to paying for half of the tuition of each student, but one thing hasn’t changed at all. The school not only planned to change how students paid for an engineering education, but how that education was delivered.

“The real purpose for Olin existing is to change engineering education in a significant way,” said Vincent Manno, provost of Olin College. “One way to think about Olin is it’s almost an educational laboratory.”

Manno, who joined Olin on July 1, said that with almost a decade of such engineering education experiments under its belt, it was time to reach out to other colleges and start comparing notes about what innovations really work and which ones can be tweaked or even discarded. To that end, Olin president Richard Miller launched the Initiative for Innovation in Engineering Education about two years ago. The I2E2, as it is called, in June of 2010 launched its inaugural I2E2 Summer Institute, bringing together 15 professors from nine colleges and universities around the country including Creighton University, Louisiana Tech, University of New Haven and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, as well as Habib University Foundation in Pakistan.

Under the guidance of Professor Lynn Stein, the director of I2E2, the Summer Institute held workshops, exercises, case studies and presentations from experts to help create and change engineering education curricula, using the lessons learned at Olin, and leavened by the experiences of the instructors from the attending colleges. And that two-way, interactive exchange is key to the way the I2E2 functions, Stein said.

“We aspire to be the clearinghouse for ideas, not the repository of knowledge,” she said.

That first summer institute and workshop series were supported by a gift from Autodesk, with scholarship support for the summer institute coming from IBM Corp. and the National Science Foundation. Earlier this summer, Olin announced that it has received a three-year grant of $300,000 from computer processor maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to support the I2E2’s efforts to improve engineering education. According to Stein, the demand for I2E2 has soared since last year, and this summer’s institute featured about 40 educators from a host of colleges. Interest in the summer institute will continue to climb, she said.

“We expect the demand to increase,” Stein said. “Since we can’t add many more people we will probably add a second week.”

Stein does point out that the program is just two years old, and when it was launched it had no infrastructure and no organization — two things she had to develop from the ground up. “Sometimes I describe it as, I was given a hunting license and a building permit,” Stein said. Armed with those tools and the mission to improve engineering education throughout the higher education cosmos, not just at Olin, Stein built the structure and programs that resulted in the summer institute and the workshops.

“We went from having activities that were very spread out and organic but not really concerted, to over the course of the first year having some presence, and over the course of the second year having a more sustainable presence and a plan,” Stein said.

The I2E2 is not the only way Olin is helping foment new ideas in engineering education. The school has established partnerships with Stanford University and the University of Illinois, for the purpose of designing new and innovative engineering curricula and teaching methods. Illinois came first, back in 2008, when the two schools signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on new curricula. Stanford followed in late 2010.

Manno notes that the three schools represent archetypal examples of the three primary kinds of engineering colleges — Stanford as the large private engineering school, University of Illinois as the large public school with a strong engineering focus and Olin as the smaller, innovative private engineering college. Each can bring different experiences to the curricula planning table, Manno said, making any end result meaningful to as diverse a student body as possible.

What the possible result of these collaborations could be in say, five years, is hard to predict, however, according to Manno.

“In higher education, five years is lightning speed,” he said. “I would like to see the decreased compartmentalization of engineering education, where Olin is recognized as one of the most important catalysts in that change.”

The efforts by Olin are ultimately focused on the students. For Manno, that means to make sure the students are properly prepared for the next steps, whether it is going immediately into the commercial world, or on to a graduate degree. Manno said that Olin has a solid track record in both areas, with students winning graduate fellowships at a good clip, and getting ranked as more experienced and industry-ready by employers in follow-up surveys the school has done. But that can also be improved by improving the way Olin teaches its students, he said.

“I want them to feel after they have been at Olin that they have more possibilities than they had when they came in,” he said.

Stein agrees that the student outcome is job No.1 at Olin, and she has plans to increase student exposure to the I2E2.

“There are students involved in some of the things that we do, but one of our goals for this year is to broaden the student involvement within Olin and in particular to bring in students and faculty members that are interested but haven’t necessarily participated as much in the past,” she said.

Ultimately, the I2E2 is an organized system that pulls together the things that are at the core of how Olin deals with its students, Stein said.

“It is a name for things that Olin does, rather than a separate organization,” she said. “It is intimately interrelated with our reason for being.”