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This paper reports the first two phases of an on-going, multi-year project that seeks to create an integrated ethics curriculum for undergraduate Biological Engineering (BE) majors at a large, public university. Our objective is to create an exemplar process that encourages engineering faculty members to contribute to, and develop ownership of, the ethics curriculum. Literature in engineering education research has called attention to faculty buy-in as one of the key indicators of successful educational innovation. Scholars of ethics education also note engineering faculty's attitude as a crucial factor in meaningful integration of ethics in the engineering curriculum. Informed by the findings of engineering education and engineering ethics literature, our project team engages the BE faculty in an ethics curriculum development initiative with five phases: 1) need assessment interviews, 2) faculty workshops, 3) curriculum design, 4) curriculum implementation, and 5) project assessment and improvement. This paper reports in detail the first two phases of this on-going project. First, one of the authors conducted semistructured interviews with instructors of BE courses to understand their present approaches to ethics education and the perceived need for improvement. Second, authors of this paper organized three interactive workshops, in which the BE faculty and our project team explored frameworks of ethical reasoning, pedagogy for ethics education, and ethics-related learning objectives. These engagement activities resulted in a list of 11 ethics related learning objectives agreed upon by the BE faculty; these learning objectives formed the basis of an ethics-across-the-curriculum experience for BE students. Informed by the interview findings and the list of ethics learning objectives, the authors continue to work with a team of BE instructors to develop appropriate course contents, instructional materials, and delivery methods in four successive courses that spread across the junior and senior years of the BE curriculum. The design, implementation, and assessment of the ethics curriculum will be reported in future publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is rapidly emerging as a critical competency for all types of organizations to ensure future success and prosperity. It is often included among the top strategic priorities for corporate leaders. This increased attention continues a trend of the last several years that highlights the importance of innovation as an organizational priority and suggests that engineering graduates must be prepared as skilled innovators in order to be successful in the technical workplace of today and the future. This paper presents ideas, models, and new directions in engineering education. The paper proposes the types of educational processes envisioned to most appropriate to instilling the innovation competencies in engineering graduates. It is proposed that the innovation competencies are best taught and learned through a new and rebalanced combination of the teaching of content and an expanded concept of experiences. Characteristics and examples of these expanded experiences are presented using modeling concepts from the field of systems engineering where experiences are represented as learner interactions. These proposed experiences must be carefully crafted to be team based, focus on exploration and experimentation, and include interaction among multiple entities including a practice innovation system. These concepts have implications for both educators and business leaders in developing innovation competencies in both graduates and engineering professionals. Instead of differentiating between experiences in school versus professional practice, the educational system described here extends from school days into professional practice, serving practicing professionals as well as students. This paper relies upon models of three distinct types of systems to provide an enhanced environment for education about and practice of the Innovation Competencies. The first of these are the Targeted Systems: the real, laboratory, or practice systems subject to innovation by learning students or practicing engineers, modeled by them as a central part of the Innovation Competencies. The second is the System of Education (itself a target of innovation), a model of which is summarized in this paper as a configurable reference model to illustrate the implied changes and advancements in different situations. The third is the System of Innovation, a model of which is referenced to understand the underlying framework in which all innovation occurs (effective or not; human-performed or not). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]