On November 4, 2021, the Ontario government announced an additional $8 million of Virtual Learning Strategy (VLS) funding that builds on the previous $50 million investment that will again be administered through eCampusOntario.
The University of Waterloo has been awarded $54,470 for a project entitled "Enabling the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges for Educators" under this latest round of funding.
Today's challenges require engineers to bring leadership, bold new ideas and innovations. To frame these challenges and inspire engineering educators to prepare students to address these complex socio technical issues, Engineering Deans Canada (EDC) has developed and endorsed the Canadian Engineering Grand Challenges (CEGCs). Developed in 2019, this “grand challenge” approach is intended to focus and inspire the engineering profession, and to provide a context for educators to prepare undergraduate students with the necessary leadership and socio technical skills to solve these large complex challenges and facilitate impactful change.
This project will create one digital learning module for each of the 6 CEGCs, providing foundational material, activities, case studies and exercises to enable engineering educators to efficiently and effectively teach the CEGCs. The modules will be designed to supplement courses or workshops, and complement learning materials, and will be available in English and French.
The modules are scaffolded by presenting a summary of the technical challenges, compiling video interviews with subject matter experts, developing case studies of the challenges from the Canadian context, and creating tools and learning activities to identify problems, address challenges and communicate potential solution ideas. Embedded within this approach are frameworks to build capacity for engineering leadership, sustainability and technology stewardship. To further facilitate use of the modules in the engineering curriculum the modules will be mapped to the required Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board graduate attributes.
Students will be involved as partners in the design and development of the module materials.