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Contribution: This study identifies the skills required by the faculty to mentor first-year interdisciplinary design projects. The findings are compiled as a set of themes that can act as a guide for engineering educators in mentoring interdisciplinary design projects. Background: The National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Engineer of 2020 report states that developing solutions to real-world problems requires engineers to possess skills to access, understand, evaluate, synthesize, and apply information and knowledge from multiple disciplines. However, most engineering students possess strong monodisciplinary expertise and skills, which are insufficient when students graduate and work in the industry. In order to equip engineers to solve real-world problems, engineering education should focus on building competencies and bringing the flavor of interdisciplinary education into the undergraduate engineering curriculum. While there is a growing call to introduce interdisciplinary courses to undergraduate engineering students, the ability of the faculty to teach and mentor students from multiple disciplines is a concern. Research Question: This study qualitatively investigates the question, "What skills do engineering faculty consider important to mentor first-year interdisciplinary engineering projects?" Methodology: The study is situated in a project-based learning course offered at first-year engineering at a university in India. It identifies the skills a faculty needs to possess to mentor students working on interdisciplinary (mechatronic) design projects through thematic analysis of faculty and student interviews. Findings: Performing qualitative analysis on the data collected from the two sources, including semistructured interviews with the faculty and students focus group discussion, reveals three dimensions on which the engineering faculty needs to be trained on. It included project management and interpersonal and interdisciplinary skills.

Service-learning as a pedagogy has been widely adopted by higher education institutions as it enables students to apply learning from the classroom to real-world experiences in the community. This pedagogy has especially become prominent in undergraduate engineering courses as students are provided opportunities to partner with community members and develop technological solutions aimed to solve the real-time challenges in the community. The number of service-learning experiences has been increasing in India in the last decade as the government of India has also launched Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, a national level program that encourages higher education institutions to partner with rural villages and become a part of socio-economic transformation. All of these efforts are also aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 of India, which emphasizes the need for the Indian education system to nurture the young generation into moral and civil citizens who later transform to become agents of change working towards the development of the country. The NEP also recommends changes in the pedagogy to make education more experiential, inquiry-driven, and meaningful. With the implementation of NEP 2020, we expect many higher education institutions, especially engineering, to adopt and integrate service-learning experiences into their curriculum. In this paper, we provide a conceptual analysis of engineering project-focused service-learning experiences and analyze the potential learning outcomes students can attain through the process. We also align the various learning outcomes with the engineering graduate attributes recommended by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) in India. The goal is to highlight how learning outcomes from service-learning experiences can be mapped to all the twelve graduate attributes recommended by NBA, thus making service-learning a very relevant pedagogy for engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most challenging tasks for faculty in their role as a teacher is to design, administrate, and evaluate formative assessments. This results in a lot of faculty not utilizing the formative assessments as a form of student feedback and make regular changes to the course. In this study, we explore the role of technology in helping faculty implement and analyze formative assessments. We believe the advancement of technology and its increasing applications in education may result in development of novel solutions to this impediment through learning analytics. This paper explores the use of such data analytics to address the challenges impeding the capacity of instructors to provide personalized feedback at scale. The study was implementing in the Computer Science and Engineering Department where a group of faculties who teach undergraduate engineering students. The faculty designed and administered a set of formative assessments in multiple courses through the learning management system. The data collected from the formative assessments was analyzed using learning analytics and the results were used to provide actionable recommendations that could better support students to achieve the learning outcomes of the course. The data was analyzed to understand and optimize the learning process of the students in the course. The results of the paper will provide insights to engineering educators on how they could take a data driven approach and harness the power of technology to better support their students. This approach will also help direct students towards deeper and self-regulated learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Purpose Scope/Method Results Conclusions Scholars agree that reciprocity is a cornerstone of service‐learning and community engagement (SLCE); however, engagement with this concept varies widely in practice and across disciplines. To enhance the potential of SLCE to fulfill its promise for societal impact, engineering education must understand how reciprocity is achieved, recognize barriers that inhibit its progress, and identify strategies for how it can be strengthened.We performed this review to understand the ways reciprocity is articulated in the engineering SLCE literature. Drawing from these articulations, we examined the extent of engagement with reciprocity toward providing insights into the design and assessment of SLCE efforts for reciprocity.We performed a systematic literature review on engineering SLCE at institutes of higher education. Following an established approach to identify and synthesize articles, we developed deductive codes by distilling three well‐articulated orientations of reciprocity. We then analyzed the operationalization of reciprocity in the literature.The literature demonstrated varying degrees of reciprocity. Minimally reciprocal efforts centered university stakeholders. In contrast, highly reciprocal partnerships explicitly addressed the nature of engagement with communities. Findings provide insights into the breadth of practice within reciprocity present in engineering SLCE. Further, analysis suggests that our codes and levels of reciprocity can function as a framework that supports the design and evaluation of reciprocity in SLCE efforts.Our review suggests that to enact more equitable SLCE, researchers and practitioners must intentionally conceptualize reciprocity, translate it into practice, and make visible the ways in which reciprocity is enacted within their SLCE efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]