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The spread of COVID-19 has significantly disrupted the educational landscape since March 2020.Instructors at higher education institutions had to quickly transition to an online environment for remote delivery of their academic programs. Even though academic programs are relatively easy to adapt for remote delivery as compared to other industries, educators were still tasked with redesigning their courses to guarantee the quality of education delivered to their students. This challenge is particularly true with engineering entrepreneurship educators since their course structures heavily focus on developing intangibles such as an entrepreneurial mindset and team collaboration through immersion into hands-on learning experiences. To create this experiential learning environment, engineering entrepreneurship educators have, in general, relied uponface-to-face interactions with students. Little has been published in the existing literature to report the challenges, strategies, and innovations that can help transition effectively and deliver such academic programs remotely. In this paper, the authors from four major Canadian higher education institutions report our experience from ‘trial-byfire’ mode to redesign and deliver various courses for remote learning. This paper is by no means presenting validated “best practices” but aims to trigger discussions surrounding tools available to educators considering such a transition. We hope that this paper will provide insights and strategies for our colleagues to employ in their future course design and delivery. We also hope to invite a conversation to learn more about our colleagues’ experiences and explore opportunities to identify and validate approaches for effectively teaching engineering entrepreneurship in a remote learning environment.

As the definition of the engineering profession continues to witness a disruptive transformation in the labour market, engineering schools are beginning to recognize the need to facilitate a new approach to education. Such a disruption has lead to the explosion of entrepreneurship education within the boarders of engineering schools in attempt to generate the talent and skills of the future engineer. There is however a gap – engineering schools were never designed to deliver entrepreneurship education. Success in this endeavour relies on a new approach to teaching; one that is founded in a group-based, experiential learning environment. At the University of New Brunswick, entrepreneurship education is a core element offered to all our engineering students. The following article proposes the CRAM – a two day hackathon designed to introduce students to a cohesion of contemporary entrepreneurship practices to accelerate group formation and acquire entrepreneurship skill sets using an inductive teaching approach. The delivery of the CRAM is discussed in detail, along with feedback from the student participants.

– The role of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is becoming more demanding as engineering education places an increased emphasis on teamwork and design. For undergraduate students to excel, GTAs must help them form well-functioning teams and encourage them to operate as self-directed learners. In other words, GTAs should operate more as coaches rather than teachers. Many GTAs, unfortunately, lack the basic competencies of to perform as a coach. In this work, we present a 3-hour workshop designed to address this skills gap. The role of a coach and basic theoretical concepts, as well as a simple tool to elicit self-reflection in students are presented through a series of experiential exercises and discussions. The exercises also give participants an opportunity to practice these newly acquired skills while developing confidence in identifying scenarios where the tool may be applied. This workshop has been executed once with a group of 10 graduate engineering students at the University of Victoria. Survey results have been encouraging, we believe that the participants successfully acquired basic coaching competencies and applied them to their interactions with undergraduate students.

As engineering education strives to progress towards a student-centric learning model, a competency gap with future educators becomes more apparent. In particular, the expectation of graduate student teaching assistants (GTAs) in attaining teaching competency to support this dynamic learning environment, often without sufficient training, is unrealistic.In the following paper, we present an implementation of the flexible Teaching Assistant Consultant (TAC) program, which serves to support the development of novice GTA competencies using a discipline-specific model with emphasis on assisting the unique challenges of international teaching assistants.We introduce the specific role of the TAC in terms of core principles and deliverables, and the strategic structure of the campus wide program at the University of Victoria. We conclude by detailing the specific implementation of the program in engineering by illustrating the role and deliverables of the engineering TAC.