The vision of the Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) is to strengthen the engineering and innovation capacity and capability of the nation by catalyzing a vibrant community of emerging engineering education leaders. To achieve the mission of recognizing accomplishment, facilitating learning, broadening collaboration, and promoting dissemination of pioneering practice in engineering education, each year FOEE brings together some of the nation’s most engaged and innovative engineering educators in order to promote effective, substantive, and inspirational engineering education through a sustained dialogue within the emerging generation of innovative faculty.

Attendees are actively teaching in U. S. engineering programs and have recently implemented significant innovations in their classes. During the 2.5 day symposium, they participate in discussions and workshops focused on approaches to classroom, laboratory, project, experiential, computer-based, or other modes of preparing engineering students to work and lead in the 21st century. Attendees also have multiple opportunities to share their innovations with others, learn from best practice, and network with colleagues. They discuss the current and evolving contexts that should shape engineering and engineering education. The program will assist them in forming an on-going, self-supporting cohort committed to innovation and sustained excellence in engineering education.

FOEE seeks to make 21st century engineering education exciting, creative, rigorous, adventurous, demanding, and empowering by:

• Presenting and propagating innovative and effective learning strategies that prepare future engineers to face 21st century challenges and opportunities.
• Raising the professional prominence of faculty who are selected for the FOEE.
• Enhancing opportunities for professional collaboration and mutual support among FOEE faculty
• Stimulating awareness of and interest in FOEE findings and events across all U.S. engineering schools.
• Documenting, over the long-term, enhanced student knowledge, skills, abilities, and attitudes as a result of local and widespread implementation of FOEE innovations.
• Enhancing, over the long-term, the recruitment, retention, and professional success of engineering students by virtue of local and widespread implementations of FOEE innovations.

Attendee Outcomes:

Attendees will strengthen their professional capacity for engineering education innovation by: 

• Identifying and understanding how to apply identified best practices in engineering education;
• Developing new ideas to advance their innovations in engineering education;
• Developing an understanding that engineering educational innovation should be guided by the evolving evidence-based body of knowledge on engineering learning, in part established through research in engineering education;
• Establishing long-lasting professional relationships with those attending the symposiums, and through those relationships establish new or broadened networks with other educational innovators;
• Becoming agents of change to help advance the U.S. capacity for engineering education innovation

Broader Impact:

The symposium will advance U.S. engineering education by: 

• Enhancing the recruitment, retention, and professional success of engineering students by virtue of local and widespread implementations of FOEE innovations;
• Encouraging increased participation of (native born) U.S. students in careers in engineering;
• Raising the visibility and importance of nurturing the U.S. capacity for engineering education innovation, and raising the prominence of the young innovators in this domain;
• Facilitating the dissemination of the participants’ educational innovations and strategies beyond the campus(es) of the participants; and
• Stimulating new educational research and practices that advance the body of knowledge on engineering learning.