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In the fifteen year period between 1990 and 2005, the National Science Foundation has had two major initiatives focusing on revolutionizing engineering education. The first – the Engineering Education Coalition Program – resulted in the funding of 44 engineering programs organized into six coalitions, each designed to “stimulate bold, innovative, and comprehensive models for systemic reform of undergraduate engineering education.” As pointed in a paper by John Daniels, Sally Wood and Sue Kemnitzer, that initiative was to greatly influence the Department-Level Reform initiative which followed over a decade later. In all, the NSF funded 80 planning grants, which were followed by 20 implementation grants between 2003 to 2005. While the last of these implementation grants ended in 2009, both implementation and assessment efforts continue at a cross-section of the country’s engineering programs. We are delighted to publish a set of twelve papers that describe a spectrum of these projects in this special issue guest edited by Mandar Dewoolkar.
Mander was actively involved in the redesign of the civil and environmental engineering programs at the University of Vermont – one of the twenty implementation projects (described in one of the papers in this volume). He has done an outstanding job of marshaling these papers through a rigorous review process, and in many cases, re-review process. As a collection, they describe an important NSF initiative, which were funded at levels ranging from $400,000 to $1,500,000. We are very pleased to present them as our eighth issue of Advances in Engineering Education.
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