Summary of “ASEE Year of Dialogue” Discussion

How should educational innovation and/or research be counted in the promotion and tenure process for engineering faculty? (or words to that effect)

Educational research must be viewed from an engineering perspective. The view of educational scholars as opposed to engineering department heads and tenure committees with regard to what constitutes quality educational research are likely to be quite different.

There is an agreement that simply apply new methods in the classroom (educational innovation) was not the same as educational research (development of new methods and knowledge and assessing their impact).

There was a consensus that this area can have an important place in the P&T evaluation. How much depends somewhat on the institution. There are schools and departments where this type of scholarly achievement will dominate the portfolio. There are others where it cannot supplant the traditional technological research that we seem to understand.

However, in all cases, there are common sets of measurable that can surely be applied to evaluate the scholarly achievements associated with educational research and also innovation. Those include publication in peer-reviewed forums (primarily archival journals), sustainable funding, and letters from peers recognizing these achievements. Just as is the case for scientific and technological research, review committees will be looking for evidence of impact of research and of sustainability of the activity.

It was noted that the University of Toronto has a tenure-track process for Senior Lecturers, which emphasizes teaching and educational innovation, with the same evidentiary requirements as for professorial tenure track positions.

Portion of tenure that is ### to educational research should be proportional to teaching responsibilities.

Educational Research Division workshop on “What makes good Educational Research?” is suggested for Dean’s Council and for faculty at upcoming meetings on a somewhat regular basis.

Where is innovation in teaching counted?  It is somewhere between rigorous technical research and rigorous educational research, but it is important.  It would be nice to have “Best Practices” compiled somewhere.  How would this effort be counted towards tenure?

It will be different at every university, based on the emphasis on teaching vs. research.  Can it be different for different faculty within an organization?

Can we have some concrete instruments to measure and assess implementation and validation of innovations in teaching?  Maybe like the criteria established by some divisions for best paper.

Topics need to be multidisciplinary for funding.

A measure of quality for education innovation could be determining who uses the innovation. This could help to provide a standard. (Suppose that you do something truly innovative or adapt an advance from engineering educational research. If nobody uses it or knows about it, the impact of the innovation will not be as widespread as it could have been.) (This comment refers more to Question 1.

ASEE should consider creating short courses on educational research, so that more faculty could get on the same page with respect to what constitutes educational research.

Implementation of new educational methodology should build on the body of knowledge. Perhaps ASEE should establish a series of synthesis documents from the various divisions of ASEE that organize sessions at national and local meetings. These could summarize trends and provide a resource so that people don’t have to do tedious searches through conference proceedings to find who is doing what in various areas. (For example, innovative freshman programs—there are lots of presentations on the subject, but little synthesis of the information that is available.)
 

Workshops on educational research methods. Perhaps the Deans Council should become involved.

Get ASEE to take initiative on developing best teaching practices documents.