Message from Dean announces iFoundry
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
In today’s Message from the Dean, Dean Ilesanmi Adesida announced the establishment of iFoundry as a college activity:
To better serve engineering in the future, a group of faculty members has been brainstorming about creative ways in which we can strengthen the creative capacity of our students–to preserve their strong technical skills while emphasizing the elements of design, entrepreneurship, and social responsibility. This led to the idea for a collaborative pilot program in the college to serve as a foundry for engineering curriculum innovation. Over the past year, the idea for such an initiative for curriculum enrichment was extensively debated among College of Engineering faculty, administrators, students, and industry stakeholders, and attracted significant interest and support to move forward.
Therefore, it is with pleasure that I announce the launch of iFoundry: The Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education, an interdepartmental curriculum innovation incubator that will serve as the focus of engineering curriculum innovation activities in the college, fostering creative enrichment of our curriculum and harnessing the innovation of our faculty to create a new paradigm for engineering education in the 21st century. I have asked Professors David Goldberg (IESE) and Andreas Cangellaris (ECE) to serve as co-directors of this initiative. Initially, iFoundry efforts will focus on realigning humanities and social science coursework in student-selected themes, injecting digital media content into new and existing coursework, and making the first two years of engineering education more effective and attractive.
Over the next couple of months, David and Andreas will be meeting with the leadership and curriculum committees of all departments in the college to discuss the vision of the initiative and engage faculty to contribute to the definition, development and implementation of an enriched educational experience for our students, faithful to the Illinois tradition for leadership in engineering education (The current iFoundry website is at http://www.ifoundry.illinois.edu).
The full text of the Dean’s message may be downloaded here.
[...] Dean Adesida’s announcements (here) and a national press release (here), the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education [...]
Pingback by iFoundry » Blog Archive » iFoundry open for business — September 5, 2008 @ 2:08 pm
I applaud the efforts for Operation Fresh. It is greatly needed.
I encourage you to look at the quality of instruction in the math department for courses required of freshman engineering students. Typical scenarios include minimal English skills and/or very new instructors. The freshman engineering students are paying a higher tuition but receiving the same instructors as liberal arts students. It seems like the engineering college has been using these course as “weed out” courses instead of seeing the need to improve instruction quality.
Secondly, the focus on making sure the students know how to get the most out of their humanities/social sciences is important. It would be good input to this process to find out how many engineers had to take extra classes because the automated systems and/or advisers did not guide them in the right directions. In general, those paying the tuition don’t like to have these sorts of things crop up that cause a student to have to spend an extra term to get when good advising or more guided graduation requirement tools could have helped. In particular, I don’t believe that the current tools point out courses that would apply for both humanities and social science requirements.
I am not using my real name as some do not like to have the obvious pointed out. I did not see a means to send in comments to someone in particular.
Comment by Alumni dad — March 6, 2009 @ 6:12 pm