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Join Us for 3 Days in
Portland, Oregon in June 2009

University Place Hotel
Portland, Oregon
[on the campus of Portland State University]
 

Help Design The Future of
Transportation Engineering Education!

What We Will Do?
We have designed a three day program in which you will (1) learn about the latest ideas in transportation engineering education, (2) address three important questions to help us improve how we deliver transportation engineering education, and (3) learn how to improve your teaching skills. 

The questions that we will consider are: (1) how do we map the learning domain for transportation engineering, (2) how do we create active learning environments for undergraduate transportation engineering students, and (3) how do we develop collaborative tools for sharing transportation engineering curricular materials?

You can also share your current work and innovative ideas in transportation education at a poster session.

How Will We Accomplish Our Work?
The format of the conference is designed to encourage participants to develop answers to these three questions.  A plenary session will be held in the morning of June 22nd, with brief presentations on the state of the art and current best practices in engineering education in general and transportation education in particular.  Working sessions will be held in the afternoon of June 22nd and all day on June 23rd for small groups to work on these three questions.  We will publish a proceedings that summarizes the results of the discussions and the action items that are identified by the working groups.  On the third day, June 24th, you can participate in a teaching workshop, sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Why Is This Important?
Nearly all of the nation’s 224 civil engineering programs have one or two required transportation courses as part of their undergraduate program.  For some civil engineering sub-disciplines, there is a logical sequence of courses leading to the required sub-discipline junior level courses such as geotechnical, materials, structures, and hydraulics.  For example, the sequence of courses from physics (kinematics), statics, dynamics, and strength of materials lays a solid foundation for the junior structures course.  For other disciplines, however, the logic and sequence is less clear or linked.  One of these sub-disciplines is transportation, particularly if, as in many programs, the transportation course emphasizes traffic engineering.  Often, students arrive in the transportation course with no prior technical experience in or knowledge of transportation, excepting their historical experience as automobile drivers, bus riders, walkers, and biker riders.  The course is often viewed as (1) not connected to their previous courses, (2) too simplistic, (3) not technically challenging, and (4) not relevant to their career goals or interests.

Instructors who teach this course have their own set of complaints: (1) textbooks are too simplistic in their approach or content, (2) there is a lack of real world problems and information about complex problems and case studies, (3) there is no laboratory time or facilities for laboratory work, (4) there is a lack of connection to previous civil engineering courses that students have taken or their engineering or science prerequisites, (5) it’s difficult to use the course as a recruitment tool for advanced elective courses or graduate study, and (6) the course is usually not multimodal in nature.  These collectively often show up as a lack of student interest in transportation engineering.

Given needs in both workforce and academia, there is both a need and opportunity to bring together university faculty and transportation professionals to focus on the undergraduate transportation engineering program and to identify ways in which it can be collectively improved.