[Dean Ayanna Howard] In 2017, The Ohio State University joined the Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network, known as KEEN, a coalition of engineering programs from across the nation committed to preparing its students with an entrepreneurial mindset. As a KEEN member, we are focused on integrating an entrepreneurial mindset into undergraduate engineering. It has become part of our culture. We believe that an entrepreneurial mindset, coupled with engineering skills, expressed through collaboration and communication and founded on character, is the key to unleashing human potential in order to solve societal problems.
Professor David Tomasko is the College of Engineering’s associate dean for academic programs and student services.
He was part of the team that advocated for our involvement in KEEN, and he’s currently co-leading a KEEN-funded project. David, I’m thrilled you’re on the pod today! Let’s talk about engineering entrepreneurs, or should we say Engi-preneurs. [David Tomasko] I love that, thanks for having me.
Anytime we get to talk about education, I’m all in.
[Dean Ayanna Howard] So all of us know what an entrepreneur is, but help our listeners understand what an entrepreneurial mindset is and why it’s so important for our students to have.
[ David Tomasko] Entrepreneurial mindset is a framework that the Kern Family Foundation and kind of began as a way of describing what they thought Engineers ought to have as they go out into the workforce. It’s really centered around three C’s: curiosity, connections, and creating value. In many ways, instilling an entrepreneurial mindset involves kind of turning engineering education into a process away from a building block of here’s what I know and trying to get students to think about what are the opportunities for me to make an impact with what I know, it’s all about connotation, right? When I think of an entrepreneur like yourself, I think of someone who has started up a company or wants to start up a company.
They want to be out on their own, very independent. But when you think about it, you don’t have to have that drive to actually understand and think like an entrepreneur.
In fact, many corporations have called it entrepreneurship, right? The entrepreneurial mindset is really capturing that aspect of entrepreneurship that is about seeking and finding the opportunity to make an impact, right?
And I can do that regardless of the type of job I’m in.
I don’t have to be the person in charge, and I don’t have to be trying to build a company. But I can do it within my local context if I’m working for a large corporation or for myself. [Dean Ayanna Howard] So, I love this concept of creating value and really thinking about engineers and our role in creating impact.
Of course, it’s about thinking about the value. So, if you think about this framework and the KEEN framework with the 3 C’s, how have we brought that to our classes?
[David Tomasko] It’s an ongoing process, and you can imagine that those concepts are very broad. So, individual faculty members are encouraged to promote this kind of framework and then be creative with it. What we’ve done so far since our involvement with KEEN back in 2018-2019 or so as we started with the first-year program, the 1181-1182 sequence. What that has turned into is away from a set of lab experiences where you are simply demonstrating. Here’s what electrical engineering might do, here’s what ISC might be, so on and so forth.
It’s now more of a project, and it’s presented to the students as, “Here’s an opportunity for you to make an impact. How might you approach this problem using the design process, for example?” Which involves curiosity, involves having to drawing connections to everything else you’ve learned, and most importantly, it’s about creating value for others.
Which is a different way of thinking rather than the student being here simply to absorb information. It’s really kind of empowering students to think about how they can apply information.
[Dean Ayanna Howard]
So, I’m pretty sure that our listeners would have never imagined someone saying Engineers, faculty, curiosity, and creativity, but that’s really what it is. [David Tomasko] Yeah, very much so. In fact, the other end of the spectrum where we’re applying this is in the Capstone program. Where many of the faculty actually, let the students apply creativity. When you present this framework to a person teaching Capstone projects, they look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s what I do.
We just haven’t called it that.” Right? And so this is the other aspect of the framework that’s actually very helpful to engineering education. Is that it gets all the different disciplines speaking a common language around this because our students are going to go out and have to work together anyway. Wouldn’t it be nice if they all had kind of a common language upon which they could build?
[Dean Ayanna Howard]
That would be very nice, and I love this concept of students entering their first contact with engineering in the first year of engineering through this framework and then when they end their journey here at Ohio State in capstone, which means that they’ve understood this whole connection of “I have no idea what engineering is, now I understand creating value,” and then as a senior, it’s like, “Oh, I got it.” [David Tomasko] That’s the idea, right? and you and I both know that there’s a lot of hard work that goes on in between.
And in fact the current aspect of the grant, the current faculty we’re trying to work with, are actually those middle faculty.
We’d like to see them reinforce this all the way through so they can find a way when they’re teaching digital design, digital circuitry design, or teaching thermodynamics classes that are traditionally very hard.
You can still talk about curiosity, creating value, and connections even in those very hard-core engineering courses. [Dean Ayanna Howard] I’m sold on this KEEN framework. Since we’ve become KEEN members, what differences have you noticed among our faculty, students, curriculum, and of course, as a data person, how are we actually measuring impact? [David Tamasko] It’s fascinating.
We are one of the few members of the network that actually has an engineering education department and education research faculty who are actually building tools to be able to do such assessments.
As you referred to. I’d like to if i can talk a little bit about one aspect of our current project where we’re trying to figure that out. Cause honestly most of the impact we observe is anecdotal at this point. I can’t point to numbers, right and I know you would ask for that. So, it’s a little frustrating, right.
So, one of the things we’re trying to do, is actually trying to measure the impact on students and see if our teaching in this framework has changed the way a student talks about and expresses their work on engineering problem-solving.
So, we have reintegrated or revised and rewritten the rubrics used in the OHI\O hackathon and the Megathon, which are strictly student-driven not classroom activities, right.
So, the students are kind of free to express themselves in their own way, and we’re going to try and measure whether students articulate some of this 3C language and some of the framework language as we have them present their hack projects. With no requirements to do so, we’re going to see if it bubbles up. I fully expect that the first time that we measure this, we’re going to get very little.
That’s just the nature of students right. But over time if we really are making an impact on the way a student thinks about their own problem-solving process, they’ll start to talk about the idea about creating value in doing what they’re doing.
Or the idea they connected with their solution from among all of the things they have learned before. So, that’s what we hope to measure, as we go through this project. [Dean Ayanna Howard] So, you mentioned the current project.
SO, this is the one title extending the EM ecosystem from the research professional practice and the student experience?
[David Tomasko] Yes, [Dean Ayanna Howard] Okay. [David Tomasko] And that’s the student experience piece that I just described. [Dean Ayanna Howard] Okay. So, there’s a lot of words in that title.
[David Tomasko] Yes, [laughs] and so, thinking about I know it only begin a few months ago. Give us somethings you are seeking to accomplish with this new project? [David Tomasko] Sure, it’s really broken into three sub-projects, which is why the title is so long because it has to include all of those but the student experience piece, and what I just spoke about, with trying to measure student responses out of the hackathon. The other big piece is the education research piece, where we are trying to actually develop assessment instruments that that get at the idea of making connections and creating value, and curiosity. It turns out that as you might guess not engineering education research, but education research there’s a whole a lot of work on curiosity, that’s well-known and well-developed topic.
And There are already assessments out there, and we’re simply adapting them into the engineering education space. There’s very little in the space of trying to measure how students think about creating value and how they do it. And how they make connections, So, were actually in the research space, developing assessment that we then hope other faculty across the network, nationwide will help us validate and help us use. So that we can collect that kind of impact data as to how the way that people implement the 3Cs in their classroom has the effect on students’ outcomes. That’s project 2. Project 3 is really that other piece that I alluded to earlier about back getting more faculty across all the disciplines. Trying to integrate the framework into this the engineering core courses.
The places that are the just notorious for being the hard courses that that have so much homework and so much difficult material, that it really is ripe for a bit of rejuvenation I would say in the approach to teaching those courses.
So, that’s the third part, we call them professional learning communities.
Where we involve the faculty and we also involve graduate students allow especially if they want to become faculty, we do graduate students and postdocs in there that’s why we call them professional learning communities instead of Faculty learning communities.
students and postdocs in there. That’s why we call them professional learning communities instead of Faculty learning communities. [Dean Ayanna Howard]: So you know, I can think about what the professional learning communities. We have some control because they’re in College of Engineering, they’re all at Ohio State. But you mentioned something around sharing assessments around the KEEN Network and being able to measure the impact.
Yeah, if you think about the difficulties with that, any thoughts? [David Tomasko]: Well, so it turns out that there is a well-established network.
The network is about,
I want to say, 60 to 70 institutions strong now. And I’ll just, you know, for listeners, if they want to visit engineeringunleashed.com, which is kind of the home of the network, you can log in and download all of these different approaches that faculty have taken.
That’s our sharing space. That’s the space where all the faculty are putting things up and saying, “Here’s what I’m doing. This has to do with creating value in a structural dynamics class. This is what I’m doing to show connections in thermodynamics.” Right, and you can actually go in there and search by your discipline, search by your topic, or search by one of the framework keywords and see other things that people are doing.
So, it will actually, it sounds difficult to get other people to get involved, but it turns out that once you get into the network and you make some friends, we are, you know, it’s actually quite easy. We have several of our faculty who are also jointly working with projects led out of Rowan University, out of Bucknell, all over the place. So, it really is kind of the foundation that fosters the development of this network in a really impactful way on the faculty. [Dean Ayanna Howard]: So, what’s interesting is that we know there’s more than 60 to 70 engineering colleges around the world. But yet, you can have someone who is interested, who’s maybe not necessarily tied into the KEEN Network, just engineeringunleashed.com, and they have access, which is wonderful. [David Tomasko] Exactly, exactly. [Dean Ayanna Howard] So, this entrepreneurial-minded learning could be a nationwide initiative, really? [David Tomasko]: Yes, yes, absolutely. [Dean Ayanna Howard]: So, it makes so much sense to me.
I mean, if you think about when we were undergrads, it was nothing like this.
[David Tomasko]: No, that’s true. You know, I’ve gotten to think, especially as I was looking over what we were going to talk about today, I started to realize another way of framing engineering education is that students come out of high school and they’re still used to a very transactional form of education. You do this. I will grade it, and I will return to you some points or a grade.
Our first-year program still has to kind of operate in that way because that’s the mindset that students are coming to us in. And then they’re trying their best to kind of get them into a different kind of mindset in that first year so that when they get into the second year, we can start really developing foundational tools and knowledge that they have to do in their discipline.
You know, like it or not, your students are still going to have to survive differential equations, still going to have to survive, you know, statics and dynamics, and whatever the disciplines are. But then, really, I think the real impact of this mindset is showing up as students get to be seniors and they get to – they start to develop that foundational knowledge and now learn how to apply it. It’s the opportunities that we start to open their eyes to.
And so, I think the real change that we’re going to see as a result of the network is that students are going to graduate knowing that: A) they’ve got knowledge, B) they know how to apply it, but C) they start to see the world as opportunities instead of just tasks and assignments.
Right, that’s – that, to me, is the real value. And furthermore, you’ll have not just mechanical engineers coming out thinking that, you’ll have Electrical Engineers, Computer Science, Chemicals, Material Scientists, and they’ll all kind of – you know, if we do this well and infiltrate it well, you’ll have a whole lot of students coming out, and they’ll actually make connections with each other much more quickly, and they’ll get off to a running start in their careers much more quickly.
[ Dean Ayanna Howard] So, mine is the little part about learning differential equations for engineers. I actually [ David Tomasko] substitute discreet math.
[Dean Ayanna Howard] I mean, if you really think about this concept, I love the three C’s of the entrepreneurial mindset for students: curiosity, connections, and of course, creating value.
I mean, honestly, I wish we could apply this concept throughout our entire lives of all the things that go on, yeah. So, while I asked David to be my guest today, there are so many faculty and staff involved in this movement, and I’m grateful for each of them.
The world needs more engine webpreneurs, and they might as well be Buckeyes. Thank you for having me.
I’m looking forward to seeing all of this play out in real time.
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