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This is a summary of Rowan University's efforts to initiate changes in diversity and inclusion with a Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. After having six years of an NSF grant, the research team initiated multiple efforts to increase a body of diverse students in the department, develop inclusive pedagogy, and develop a means for sustainable change within the university after the grant's end. To increase the number of diverse students, the department looked at a holistic approach to recruitment and enrollment. To better understand the students' experience, surveys and interviews were conducted with specific questions regarding how they viewed the climate of diversity and inclusion within their classes and the university at large. Multiple mentoring efforts were also started so that students received support in their collegiate careers. With regards to inclusive pedagogy, the department faculty were encouraged to develop relevant examples for students' career developments. These examples addressed diversity from a global perspective as well as domestic issues of inequality. With the grant approaching its end, there was increased efforts to make sustainable change within the whole university. With backing from the grant, faculty members received internal funds that focused on the develop of inclusive pedagogy. This occurred twice during the lifetime of the grant. The researchers also developed a workshop series that would include all strategies used to develop inclusive pedagogy for faculty outside of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. This workshop was done to support changes made to promotion practices where faculty would receive encouragement and credit for addressing diversity and inclusion in their tenure with the university. This poster will highlight the research team's role in developing and implementing these changes for the sixth year of the grant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work-in-progress paper examines four free online courses addressing LGBTQ+ topics and issues and provides recommendations for creating new content and resources for allies in higher education. This exploratory work is guided by the following questions: What free LGBTQ+ courses are available for learners and educators? What content do these courses cover? What are the overlaps among these courses and what new strategies could be adopted when developing new LGBTQ+ resources for people in academia? The scope of this paper explores the content and instructional strategies of courses offered on Coursera, a massive open online course (MOOC) platform. Our preliminary findings indicate that the courses offer many insights and strategies for becoming an ally, fostering inclusive environments, and showing up for LGBTQ+ students; however, they put a smaller emphasis on LGBTQ+ academics and their experiences. Based on these findings, recommendations for educators and course developers are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at Rowan University is currently participating in the National Science Foundation's Revolutionizing Engineering and computer science Departments (RED). RED is a program that seeks to improve the undergraduate engineering curriculum to graduate engineering and computer science students that are more inclusive and suited for the 21st century workforce. The CEE Department's contribution to the RED program is called Revolutionizing Engineering Diversity (RevED). The RevED team is embarking on its second year, building on the momentum established in the prior year. Under guidance from RevED, the CEE Department faculty have taken part in workshops that have established a shared set of values and language around diversity and inclusion. The CEE Department is currently engaged in implementing inclusive curriculum in several courses offered freshman through senior year. This poster intends to showcase the developments made in several CEE courses that have developed student projects or assignments that enable students to have a more global and diverse experience, which in turn creates a more inclusive environment. The RevED team will show how these inclusive assignments were created to attain alignment with departmental goals and how they were used to assess student learning. The poster will also showcase how the CEE student body has changed between both years since the initiation of the RevED team's efforts. Our engagement with partners within the university have helped us identify more targeted ways to recruit and support students. Over the first two years, RevED surveyed students regarding the climate of diversity within the CEE Department. The poster will show changes from student responses from the baseline survey to now. The intent of the comparison is to show how the RevED team's visibility has impacted the way in which the CEE Department approaches diversity. The poster will also illustrate how the RevED team has made changes since the first year and what future plans are being made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineers on Wheels (EOW) is a mobile engineering outreach program sponsored by Rowan University. Each semester, a group of 4-6 interdisciplinary engineering students is tasked to bring lessons that cover science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to a number of elementary and middle schools in the surrounding area, focusing on students from grades 5-8. On a weekly basis for a span of approximately six weeks, visits are made to the various schools to promote continuous learning and provide a more detailed look at the various disciplines in engineering. The repeated visits also allow the EOW team members to develop a rapport with the students that they are working with to enable them to provide mentorship and guidance in advising the children on a path to a successful career within the STEM field. Each discipline is spotlighted through a traditional classroom lesson which is then paired with a creative and thoughtprovoking hands-on activities and experiments. The activities are intended to spike student interest in STEM and facilitate a deeper understanding of the impacts that engineers have on their everyday lives. Founded in 2010 under the direction of Dr. Kauser Jahan, the outreach program has shown great success in maintaining and generating young student interest in STEM disciplines. The program begins and ends with an anonymous survey to allow the EOW team to quantify the changes in general knowledge and interest in pursuing engineering careers. The results over the years have consistently shown positive results. It is anticipated that these mobile efforts will result in increasingly diverse classes of engineering at Rowan University as generations of past student participants approach the college age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in partnership with state highway agencies (State DOTs) offers an annual program known as the National Summer Transportation Institute (NSTI). This program is typically held in most states across the nation and aims to increase awareness of the potential career opportunities in the transportation industry among middle and/or high school students. The program focuses on minority, female, and underrepresented groups of middle and/or high school students. In this paper, a discussion of the outcomes of the NSTI program, hosted by Rowan University in the summer of 2017, and the degree to which the program met its goals will be presented. To fulfill these goals, faculty from the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) department and Center for Research and Education in Advanced Transportation Engineering Systems (CREATEs) at Rowan University prepared a comprehensive academic and enhancement curriculum. This curriculum included a variety of activities that aimed to introduce three modes of transportation (i.e., air, land, and water) along with relevant safety concepts to high school students. To assess the degree to which the goals of the program were achieved, several evaluation forms were prepared and distributed to the participating students on daily activities, field-trips, and end of the program evaluation. Based on the analysis of the evaluation forms, it was found that the curriculum utilized was successful at achieving the goals of the NSTI program. The evaluation results also indicated that the participating students enjoyed the various sessions and activities, thus, suggesting that the management of the program at Rowan University was successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on evaluation of a dual first-year student advising program. Rise in enrollment growth has prompted the College of Engineering at Rowan University to switch from faculty-led advising to a dual system, where a professional advisor assists first-year students with course registration and faculty continue to provide career related guidance.

Students at the Rowan University department of Mechanical Engineering have been assigned a long-term, large-scale design/build project in order to study the effects of integrating the curriculum on subject matter retention and design efficacy. The project, a bench-scale hybrid electric powertrain system, is designed, analyzed and fabricated by students in six modules, starting in their sophomore year and culminating in their final semester as seniors. This complex project has been selected in order to integrate the core mechanical engineering courses: Mechanical Design, Thermodynamics, System Dynamics and Control, and Fluid Mechanics. A bench-scale hybrid-electric vehicle powertrain has sufficient complexity to involve all Mechanical Engineering disciplines and the simplicity to be built by students over the course of five semesters. The research is designed to test two hypotheses: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rowan University has recently been awarded Research Institution status. With this new designation there is an increasing emphasis on graduate education and on recruiting talented graduate students from both our undergraduate programs and from schools in our region. In order to promote recruitment and enhance retention, the university has developed a Teaching Fellows Program that provides our graduate students with funding for four semesters as they work toward a Master's Degree in their chosen major. With this opportunity in mind, the College of Engineering Dean's Office and the four department Chairpersons formed a committee to develop a summer training program that prepares the Teaching Fellows for the classroom experience. The program has four stages: 1) Orientation, 2) Instruction, 3) Classroom Immersion, and 4) Individual Practice. In this paper each stage is described in detail. This intensive training program with its novel use of classroom experience in summer programs has provided the Teaching Fellows the opportunity to gain the confidence and skills to succeed in their Fellowship requirements. A full description of the program and assessment data and analysis are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rowan University, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems (C-SOPS), continues to develop teaching modules and problem sets to introduce students to engineering concepts in the particle and powder technology of pharmaceutical processing and drug delivery systems. The Center is hosted by Rutgers University and also includes Purdue University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. The goal of the Center is to become a national focal point for developing structured organic particulate systems used in pharmaceuticals and their manufacturing processes. Rowan University has partnered as an outreach/education member institution to develop teaching modules for K-12 and college level students. The Rowan University efforts have focused on mobile, hands-on teaching modules, problem sets and illustrative examples. Mobile, self-contained experiments in V-mixing, pneumatic conveying, particulate deagglomeration and segregation, and hopper flow have been designed, constructed and integrated in chemical engineering courses and K-12 outreach efforts. Experiments involving the statistical analysis of pharmaceutical tablet compositions, fluidization of excipients, pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics, drug delivery using environmentally sensitive polymers, and strip film drug delivery have been developed and integrated in lower and upper level chemical engineering courses. Illustrative examples to teach life cycle analysis concepts in pharmaceutical processes have also been developed. This work will highlight some of the experiments and educational modules and present methods to integrate them in the engineering curriculum and outreach efforts. The new teaching modules and demonstrations presented here add to the material developed over a five (5) year collaboration with the NSF funded C-SOPS. This collaboration can serve as a model for the development of teaching materials and outreach efforts in engineering education. The self-contained, mobile educational modules and illustrative examples give students the opportunity to learn technologies important to the pharmaceutical and chemical industries and to apply foundation chemical engineering principles. The completed educational materials will be incorporated into the C-SOPS website for use by Center members and faculty at other schools. This work will serve to expand and strengthen the educational impact of the Center in the region and throughout the country. It also serves to integrate important technologies in the chemical engineering curriculum and enhance the understanding of and interest in engineering among K- 12 students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes in detail the planning, development, and growth of a new online engineering management program. Planning began for the new Master of Engineering Management (MEM) Program at Rowan University in January 2007 with a comprehensive online review of 41 engineering management programs nationwide. The goal of this review was to determine the most-common practices regarding engineering management programs and courses nationwide and the key courses required for an effective engineering management program. In Spring 2007, proposals for the new MEM program were submitted to the University Senate at Rowan University for university review and approval and to the Academic Issues Committee of the New Jersey President's Council for state review and approval. The MEM program was approved by the university and the state in Fall 2007 and the first courses in the MEM program were taught as hybrid courses beginning in Fall 2007. Conversion to 100% online courses was completed by Fall 2008. All courses are now offered fully online in an accelerated 8-week format. The program offers two courses per semester with a total of six courses per year. Graduation requirements call for students to complete 10 three-credit courses. Courses are currently scheduled such that students can complete their degree requirements in five consecutive semesters. Courses are structured such that students can begin the 10-course sequence at any point. To date, the program has admitted 142 students with the first graduate in Summer 2009. A total of 79 students have graduated from the MEM program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The project, a bench-scale hybrid electric powertrain system, is designed, analyzed and fabricated by students in six modules, starting in their sophomore year and culminating in their final semester as seniors. This complex project has been selected in order to integrate the core mechanical engineering courses: Mechanical Design, Thermodynamics, System Dynamics and Control, and Fluid Mechanics. A bench-scale hybrid-electric vehicle powertrain has sufficient complexity to involve all Mechanical Engineering disciplines and the simplicity to be built by students over the course of five semesters. The work is designed to test two hypotheses: 1. A long-term design project that integrates knowledge from multiple courses strengthens student knowledge retention. 2. A large-scale design project requiring tools from many courses improves student problem-solving and design skills. By integrating five semesters of the mechanical engineering curriculum into a cohesive whole, this project has the potential to transform the way undergraduate education is delivered. Before and after testing is being conducted to assess: a) Change in retention between courses and b) Change in student problem-solving and design skills. Students at Rowan University have built almost all of the "hardware" for the HPT (air engine, planetary gearset, tachometer, etc.) in earlier semesters. The control system is the "capstone" for the five-semester design project, which has been described in an earlier publication [1]. This paper describes the development of the "faculty prototype" of the control system, and gives preliminary results of implementing the control system design project in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examined at a holistic level, the human body is composed of unit operations maintaining a steady state known as homeostasis. Many of these unit operations have engineering analogs. These parallels are explored readily for pedagogical purposes, either as novel problems or as hands-on tools for enhancing conceptual knowledge. In this paper, we present two strategies for using the study of artificial organs in chemical engineering courses at Rowan University. The first strategy promotes self-guided discovery and design through a semester-long project. This strategy has been implemented into a graduate and senior level elective course called Biomedical Engineering Processes at Rowan University. In the beginning of the semester, each student group selects an existing artificial organ. Students are then challenged to research the organ paying attention to the engineering aspects needed to create the organ artificially, and to propose an innovative design to address at least one of the outstanding challenges. These projects provide opportunities for open-ended problem solving, collaborative learning and design, and the application of chemical engineering principles to novel problems. This paper describes the project, sample student solutions, and student feedback. The second strategy involves the development of laboratory experiments that mimic artificial organs in order to reinforce engineering principles. Faculty at Rowan University are developing a set of modules focusing on various artificial organs. In this paper, we highlight the work on the thermoregulatory properties of artificial skin. Human skin contains incredible networks of microcapillaries that, in addition to delivering nutrients, enhance heat exchange between the body core and the environment as a result of increased surface area. In this work, we have created an artificial microcapillary network by encapsulating cotton candy in an elastomer. We are currently adapting this as a laboratory exercise where students will investigate conductive and convective heat transfer in this networked path. The objective of this laboratory activity will be to reinforce the importance of heat transfer surface area. In this paper, we present the laboratory activity and our plans for adapting the activity in engineering courses at Rowan University. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A hybrid flipped course has been used for two years in a first year engineering course at Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ, USA. In the Fall 2013 semester there were 12 sections of 20 - 25 students. The course is considered a "hybrid" because the textbook and a majority of the homework exercises are delivered online. The course is considered "flipped" because students are quizzed (online) on the course ebook before material is covered in class. This allows instructors to focus on more advanced and active learning during class time. The purpose of this paper is to describe the hybrid flipped course format in detail, focusing on the ebook and online homework. The results of surveys of students and instructors are used to explore the functionality of hybrid flipped courses. Levels of satisfaction with the online aspects of the course were high amongst students and teachers. Pathfinder was somewhat successful at getting students to prepare for class, primarily by creating an atmosphere of expected preparation, which was accentuated by the fact that graded online exercises were required prior to class. While a number of active learning techniques were employed in the Fall 2013 semester, more are envisioned for future course offerings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]