Seventy-seven of the nation's most innovative, young engineering educators were invited to the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium this year – and two were from the Michigan State University College of Engineering.
Laura Genik, an academic specialist – teaching, and Carl Lira, an associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science, were selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants to attend the sixth annual meeting, Oct. 26-30 in Irvine, Calif.
Attendees were nominated by NAE members or deans based on their ability to develop and implement innovative educational approaches in a variety of engineering disciplines. They will come together for the event to share ideas, learn from research and best practices in education, and leave with a charter to bring about improvement in their home institution.
“I have used a number of active and engaged learning activities in the classroom throughout my career,” Genik said. “I prefer to have the students working as opposed to me straight lecturing. This has become more challenging as class sizes increase.”
At the FOEE symposium, she will share her ongoing experiences of how to make mega-classrooms small. Genik said there is an increasing need for more engineers who are technically competent in an ever-changing technical landscape.
Lira actively integrates technology into education and expects students to use computational tools such as MATLAB in homework assignments. He has been teaching an online course since about 2001. He is coauthor of a widely used textbook, “Introductory Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics.”
“Improving educational technology will help educators individualize education, allowing students to more quickly make self-assessments and focus their own learning,” he said.