(268a) Developing Engineering Education Publications through Teaching and Service Actvities

Faculty job functions are broadly divided into teaching, scholarship and service activities.  Time management is a challenge faced by all faculty members (particularly those still in the probationary period).  In particular, a faculty person must often balance the desire to spend his/her time on activities he/she find the most interesting, exciting or rewarding, with the realities of what will be rewarded for tenure,  promotion and career advancement.  For example, if a faculty person is passionate about teaching, but is being evaluated primarily based on his/her record of achievement in scholarship, then he/she might be advised to focus on research and control the amount of time and energy spent on teaching.  However, another strategy in such a case is to develop publishable scholarship from one’s teaching activities.  This presentation will focus on time-efficient strategies for doing so. 

In this presentation, the author will present several examples of educational papers published by himself and by others in his department.  Each is a paper stemmed from an innovation that was introduced by a young faculty member who was teaching a course for the first or second time.  The faculty member did not necessarily set out to write a paper, he or she was simply a dedicated teacher who was pursuing a new and good idea on how to improve a course.  However, in each case, by crafting and executing an assessment plan, the instructor was able to develop this “good idea” into an educational publication.  Notably, the assessment activities, while essential for producing a publishable paper, were not particularly time-intensive and in some cases were completely integrated with the grading of individual student assignments.  Consequently, producing the paper required relatively little “extra” effort beyond activities that were inherently part of teaching the course.