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From the Ground Up: Rethinking Engineering Education
The Grand Challenges of the 21st century are marked by high levels of complexity resulting in the need for new engineering skills, including multidisciplinary teamwork, entrepreneurial thinking, creativity and design, and systems thinking. As a result, a whole new approach to engineering education is needed, addressing the following concerns: we are attracting the wrong people, teaching them the wrong stuff, and using pedagogical approaches that are known to be largely ineffective. To address these concerns, the F.W. Olin Foundation spent nearly $500 million to start over to develop a whole new approach to higher education plus a new paradigm for undergraduate engineering education. This talk will provide a summary of lessons learned at Olin College in ten years of experiments and an overview of the new learning model that has emerged.