Tag Archives: university

Open Access Education Materials

Watch a video of Richard Baraniuk (Rice University professor speaking at TED) discussing Connexions: an open-access education publishing system. The content available through Connexions includes short content modules such as:

What is Engineering??:

Engineering is the endeavor that creates, maintains, develops, and applies technology for societies’ needs and desires.
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One of the first distinctions that must be made is between science and engineering.
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Science is the study of what is and engineering is the creation of can be.

and: Protein Folding, as well as full courses, such as: Fundamentals of Electrical Engineering I and Physics for K-12.

Related: Google technical talk webcasts (including a presentation by Richard Baraniuk at Google) – podcasts of Technical Talks at Google – science podcast posts – Berkeley and MIT courses online

The World’s Best Research Universities

Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University produces a ranking of the top universities annually (since 2003). The methodology used focuses on research (publications) and faculty quality (Fields and Nobel awards and citations). While this seems a very simplistic ranking it still provides some interesting data: highlights from the 2006 rankings of Top 500 Universities worldwide include:

Country representation in the top schools:

location	Top 101	% of World Population	% of World GDP	% of top 500
USA	54	4.6%	28.4%	33.4%
United Kingdom	10	0.9	5.1	8.6
Japan	6	2.0	11.2	6.4
Canada	4	0.5	2.4	8.0
The rest of Europe	18			4.4
Australia	2	0.3	1.5	3.2
Israel	1	0.1	0.3	1.4

Update: see our post on 2007 best research universities results

Top 10 schools:

Harvard University
Cambridge University
Stanford University
University of California at Berkeley
Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT)
California Institute of Technology
Columbia University
Princeton University
University Chicago
Oxford University

Continue reading →

Economic Benefits and Science Higher Education

University Tries to Make Texas a Science Force:

In an effort to make Texas a magnet for scientific and medical research, the University of Texas is planning a $2.5 billion program to expand research and teaching in the sciences, including medicine and technology.

The initiative would be one of the largest investments in expansion by a public university, university officials said.

Berkeley and MIT courses online

Huge amount of University of California Berkely webcasts of course lectures. Subscribe to RSS feeds and listen to podcasts or listen online.

Courses include: General Biology, Solid State Devices and Introductory Physics. Course websites include handouts for the lectures.

A great open access resource.

I can’t believe I have mentioned MIT open courseware before but a search didn’t find anything. MIT’s effort is an excellent resource, many on science and engineering: Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Materials Science and Engineering, etc..

MIT also includes the excellent: Visualizing Cultures – a gateway to seeing history through images that once had wide circulation among peoples of different times and places by John Dower (author of National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning: Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II) and Shigeru Miyagawa.

The Future is Engineering

Do Great Engineering Schools Beget Entrepreneurism? by Brent Edwards provides two great links.

How to Kick Silicon Valley’s Butt by Guy Kawasaki:

Focus on educating engineers. The most important thing you can do is establish a world-class school of engineering. Engineering schools beget engineers. Engineers beget ideas. And ideas beget companies. End of discussion.

If I had to point to the single biggest reason for Silicon Valley’s existence, it would be Stanford University—specifically, the School of Engineering. Business schools are not of primary importance because MBAs seldom sit around discussing how to change the world with great products.

Why Startups Condense in America:

You need a great university to seed a silicon valley, and so far there are few outside the US. I asked a handful of American computer science professors which universities in Europe were most admired, and they all basically said “Cambridge” followed by a long pause while they tried to think of others. There don’t seem to be many universities elsewhere that compare with the best in America, at least in technology.

Both essays make many excellent points – read them! Continue reading →

Improving Undergraduate Science Education

The Meyerhoff Scholarship Program program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County uses innovative strategies to improve the performance of undergraduate science students.

At the start of their freshman year, all Meyerhoff Scholars attend an accelerated six-week residential program, called Summer Bridge, which includes course work, cultural explorations and meetings with leaders in science and technology. Summer Bridge sets up patterns for work and study that will shape student’s experiences for their years at UMBC and beyond.
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Rather than fostering a climate of competition, the program stresses cooperation and collaboration. Scholars rely on mutual support and continually challenge each other to do more, creating a positive learning environment.

Why American College Students Hate Science by Brent Staples:

The students are encouraged to study in groups and taught to solve complex problems collectively, as teams of scientists do. Most important, they are quickly exposed to cutting-edge science in laboratory settings, which demystifies the profession and gives them early access to work that often leads to early publication in scientific journals.

While the need to improve science and engineering education is real we should remember that many good efforts exist. Expanding on the good efforts that exist and continuing to improve education system will benefit not just those students that participate but all of us that benefit from the work they will do.

”It’s Cool to Be Smart” by Kate Swan:

The strategy is working. When UMBC researchers compared the performance of early Meyerhoff graduates with that of students who had qualified for the program but gone elsewhere, Meyerhoff Scholars were twice as likely to graduate with an engineering, math, or science degree, and more than five times as likely to attend graduate school in those fields.

Olin Engineering Education Experiment

Excellent article: The Olin Experiment by Erico Guizzo:

Founded with more than US $460 million from the F.W. Olin Foundation, the school, which will graduate its first class at the end of this month, was conceived as perhaps the most ambitious experiment in engineering education in the past several decades. Olin’s aim is to flip over the traditional “theory first, practice later” model and make students plunge into hands-on engineering projects starting on day one. Instead of theory-heavy lectures, segregated disciplines, and individual efforts, Olin champions design exercises, interdisciplinary studies, and teamwork.

And if the curriculum is innovative, the school itself is hardly a traditional place: it doesn’t have separate academic departments, professors don’t get tenured, and students don’t pay tuition – every one of them gets a $130 000 scholarship for the four years of study.

Find out more about the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.

Building a Better Engineer by David Wessel:

To a visitor, the school resembles any other small college. What’s different about it is its almost messianic mission: to change the way engineers are educated in the U.S. so that they can help the U.S. compete in a global economy with lots of smart, ambitious engineers in China, India and elsewhere. “If they become another good engineering school, they will have failed,” says Woodie Flowers, an MIT professor advising Olin. “The issue is to do it differently enough and to do it in way that will be exportable” to other colleges.

We share more thoughts on Olin’s efforts to improve engineering education on our other blog.

Harvard Elevates Engineering Profile

Harvard is planing to move engineering education to the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (via Engineering is Becoming a Liberal Art).

The Technology Mosaic by David Epstein:

as Paul S. Peercy, dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin and chair of the Engineering Dean’s Council at the American Society for Engineering Education put it: “I used to say, ‘look around, everything except the plants are engineered.’ Now I say, ‘look around, everything and some of the plants are engineered.’”

From Harvard’s announcement:

President Lawrence H. Summers. “It marks our recognition of the profound importance of technology and applied sciences for every aspect of our society. It makes visible our commitment to major new resources and faculty positions in this vital area, and our dedication to educating a new generation of technologically-literate students.

In order to provide adequate coverage of modern engineering and applied science for students and to be in the vanguard of emerging research areas, the school plans to increase the university’s engineering and applied sciences faculty by about 50 percent in the coming years.

Engineering Education Worldwide

Quality vs. Quantity in Engineering

This article discusses the Duke study (USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates) proposing an adjustment to the numbers used for comparing engineering education results of the United States, China and India.

Like Wadhwa, Johnson suggested that the recent emphasis on increasing the number of engineers in America should take a back seat to promoting quality. “The fact there may be X, Y or Z number of [science and engineering graduates] floating around, doesn’t necessarily speak to the question of does that represent the actual high level high skill innovative talent American industries are looking for,” he said.

Proposed Legislation on Science and Education

“Protecting America’s Competitive Edge” Legislation Proposal

Proposals include:

Each year, up to 10,000 bright students would receive a 4-year scholarship to earn a bachelor’s degree in science, engineering or math, while concurrently earning teacher certification. In exchange for these scholarships, they would be expected to serve for at least four years as a math or science teacher.
Each year, up to 25,000 bright young Americans would receive a 4-year competitive scholarship to earn a bachelor’s degree in science, engineering or math, so that our brightest students pursue studies in these fields which are so critical to our economic growth. Up to 5,000 students who have already earned their bachelor’s degree, would compete to receive graduate research fellowships to cover education costs and provide a stipend.