T H E M E T WO
The Forefront of Engineering Education
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
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The Forefront of Engineering Education Queen’s Engineering has long been recognized for its strengths in providing a robust and engaging undergraduate experience. The Faculty continues to attract top undergraduate students, and alumni find meaningful employment and leadership roles across the globe. It has a major recruitment advantage with the free discipline choice, which often distinguishes Queen’s from its competitors.
Global reviews of engineering education identify silos between disciplines as a major challenge that constrains the development of engineering education. Queen’s Engineering has recognized experts in educational trends in their Engineering Teaching and Learning Team (ETLT) and faculty who have internally identified many directions to ensure that their curriculum is up-to-date and attentive to global engineering education trends. The ETLT and the faculty need to be enabled and supported to make revisions. Faculty, students, alumni, employers, and staff all identified the need to ensure that students have access to hands-on learning that connects to the challenges and issues that face organizations and that have been identified in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Further commitment is needed to ensure that both undergraduate and graduate curriculum is focused on training problem-solvers who can work with people from a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Engineers have always been problem solvers, but the scope and the challenge of the problems that we are facing have grown in complexity and scale—we need to ensure that our curriculum prepares students to tackle major issues from urban development and land usage to providing healthcare to remote populations to mitigating climate change. Queen’s Engineering is committed to a learning environment where “Curiosity Creates.” While there will always be requirements for discipline-specific technical skills, there is need for space for students to experiment and learn broadly and see how their skills can be applied to different contexts.
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
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To push the frontiers of education, ensuring that the school has a curriculum and a set of work-integrated learning options that are recognized as being among the most innovative in North America.
OBJECTIVE 4.
Commit to curiosity-driven and challenge-based education SA 4.1
Provide courses scenarios that introduce student to the grand challenges that engineers can help solve and ensure they are given the space to experiment through trial and error when working on these issues.
SA 4.2
Develop more connections between undergraduate study and research through research assistantships, research based internships, work-integrated learning opportunities or other means.
SA 4.3
Commit to ensuring that applied courses also introduce students to real-world challenges and issues.
SA 4.4
Identify key social challenges in the local community, Ontario, Canada, and/or around the world that students and the community can work collaboratively though class work and field work.
SA 4.5
Provide graduate students with opportunities to meet professionals outside of academia to learn how their skills and knowledge can be applied across sectors (e.g. support of invention 2 Innovation - i2I - program).
SA 4.6
Commit to understanding and incorporating ways of knowing from nearby Indigenous nations, such as holistic framing of what makes a project necessary and what decolonizing curriculum means in an engineering context.
SA 4.7
Map how core courses in mathematics, sciences, and programming connect to design and applied courses across all four years of the undergraduate degree.
SA 4.8
Connect both undergraduate and graduate students to entrepreneurial opportunities by fostering connections with start-ups and/or having students explore commercialization of their research and/or course work.
SA 4.9
Ensure that instructors re-tool courses in ways that are more inclusive.
Queen’s Engineering: Driving Curiosity Forward
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OBJECTIVE 5.
OBJECTIVE 6.
Enhance interdisciplinary learning
Expand professional experience options
SA 5.1
Investigate feasibility of an integrated engineering program for students who are interested in a more general and multi-disciplinary curriculum experience.
SA 6.1
SA 5.2
Investigate and decide on a new interdisciplinary undergraduate program in Biomedical Engineering.
Nurture career ready graduates through career training that equips students to succeed in an ever-changing and complex world of work, including providing them with information on career preparation from the first year.
SA 6.2
Identify and design integrative course “threads” that provide students with a curated list of courses across disciplines that tackle a common theme, such as addressing a Sustainable Development Goal.
Look for ways to support and expand extra-curricular opportunities, such as student design teams, conferences, or clubs, while seeking ways to recognize their work through digital badges or micro-credentials.
SA 6.3
In addition to the Queen’s Undergraduate Internship Program, develop a range of signature summer experience options with diverse opportunities for students to develop professional skills and gain meaningful work experience in the public, private and non-profit sectors.
SA 6.4
Develop a plan for engaging Queen’s exceptional community of alumni as a key constituency for work-integrated learning experiences.
SA 6.5
Accelerate the Corporate Relations program to provide students and employers with enhanced support for work experiences, internships and careers.
SA 5.3
SA 5.4
Ensure that faculty and staff are provided with time and professional incentives to develop scenarios and challenges which students can work with in applied courses and in their capstone courses.
SA 5.5
Commit to reviewing upper-year electives, with the objective of reducing barriers such as pre-requisites (where possible), establishing bridging courses that facilitate an overall increase in cross-listed courses that students in different disciplines can take, and offering courses jointly by faculty in different departments.
SA 5.6
Expand opportunities to have students take courses outside of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science as a core part of their Engineering education with a specific aim to jointly develop courses with FAS in areas that speak to global challenges or themes facing students from multiple disciplines.