Rob Reilly Ed.D.
President IEEE Education Society
USA

There is Educational Pedagogy and there is Educational Pedagogy

It is widely acknowledged in the field of education that students do not typically acquire a deep understanding of the material they are supposed to learn in their courses. Students normally settle for, and professors too often deliver, shallow knowledge, such as lists of concepts, a handful of facts about each concept, and disconnected definitions of key terms. Thus students lack a deep coherent understanding that organizes the knowledge and that enables the learner to generate inferences, solve problems skills, and finally leads-to the application of knowledge to practical situations.

When professors present material to their class, it is usually in a polished form that omits the natural steps of making mistakes (feeling confused), recovering from them (overcoming frustration), diagnosing what went wrong (not becoming dispirited), and starting over again (with hope, determination, and maybe even enthusiasm). The polished deliveries in classrooms foster rule-based thinking, but rarely facilitate model-based reasoning; yet model-based reasoning is essential for STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) learners. These future learners must be capable of doing dynamic reasoning, diagnostic reasoning, cognitive assessment, and metacognitive appraisal. The educational system must provide for the development of STEM learners, teachers and mentors. The educational pedagogy must include an understanding of the learning process: the ability to understand and model how-to-learn, how to solve a unique problem even when confronted with discouraging setbacks during its solution.

This presentation offers a first step to change the basic approach to the pedagogy used in teaching a science.

The Speaker

Dr. Reilly received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, a Master of Education degree from Springfield College in Massachusetts in 1976, and a Doctor of Education degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1997. He served as a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts. At the MIT Media Lab, he was a Visiting Scientist for 6 years where he worked in his primary research area, which is the development of affect-sensitive cognitive machines (a computer that can assess what the user is learning and if that ‘learning’ is accurate).

Dr. Reilly is the President of the IEEE Education Society. He has received the IEEE Computer Society’s 2003 Distinguished Contributions in a Pre-College Environment Award; the IEEE Education Society’s 2006 Edwin C. Jones, Jr. Meritorious Service Award; and the IEEE’s 2006 Larry K. Wilson Transnational Award, the IEEE’s Leadership Award in 2009, and the 2010 IEEE Education Society’s William E. Sayle Award for Achievement in Education Award.

Judson Harward
MIT
USA

Online Labs:
Bridges to Connect the Next Generation of Global Scientists and Engineers

Scientists and engineers typically believe that laboratory experimentation is a critically important part of training in their fields. Due to logistical or resource constraints, however, students are often denied such laboratory experiences. MIT's iLab Project addresses this by providing access to real laboratory experiments via the Internet. MIT has partnered with many universities in the US, Europe, Australia, China, and India over the 13 year history of the project to share iLabs and to help launch new development teams.

Over the past two years, however, MIT and its iLab partners have shifted their strategy to embrace the broader concept of online labs regardless of software architecture and have helped to launch the Global Online Laboratory Consortium. This new organization seeks to create standards for the interoperation of online lab systems and to provide portals and economic mechanisms to encourage the sharing of online labs between institutions. This effort has also led us to a reexamination of what role labs can and should play in education. While online labs can easily cater to bounded and passive learning experiences, we have found that they can also introduce students to the fundamental engineering cycle of requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing and evaluation. Finally, online labs offer unique opportunities for students to learn that modern science and engineering are inherently global and interdisciplinary fields. They can truly become the bridges that lead our students beyond university and national boundaries to learn the skills necessary to build global partnerships in the 21^st century.

The Speaker

Dr. Judson Harward is Principal Research Scientist and Associate Director at MIT's Center for Educational Computing Initiatives. He has served as software architect and project manager for the iLab Shared Architecture for the past seven years. He is currently co-Principal Investigator of the iLab-Africa project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and acts as chair of the Technical Committee of the Global Online Laboratory Consortium. He co-teaches one of the large undergraduate computing courses at MIT, and his research interests include service-oriented architecture design and distributed multimedia.

Arthur Edwards Block
Universidad de Colima
Mexico

Educational Achievement, Connectivity and Engineering Education

The Middle East and Latin America appear to be worlds apart. Although the process of globalization has brought many countries much closer, there is still relatively little contact between these two parts of the world. The purpose of this keynote address is to present many similarities betwem Mexico, one on Latin America's leading countries, and Turkey, its closest homologue in the Arab region. Comparisons with other Middle East and northern African countries (especially Jordan) will be made in the areas of education and connectivity. The talk will then conclude by asking a series of questions related to Engineering Education that need to be asked by engineering educators in both regions in order to develop more and better engineers who are socially and economically relevant.

The Speaker

Arthur Edwards holds a master in education from the University of Houston where he graduated in 1985. Since then he has worked at the University of Colima, Mexico, in the areas of curriculum and instruction and, for the past 15 years, the College of Telematics. He has been author or coauthor of over 50 journal articles, 10 book chapters and 2 textbooks. He is also the co-founder of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, the Self Access Centers for Self-Study, and participant in the establishment of the University English Program. He has been awarded the University of Colima's distinguished teacher award 5 times.

Since 1995, he has been assigned to the College of Telematics at the same university where he established Computer Aided Language Learning as a field of investigation. Since then, Professor Edwards has also become involved in different research areas including e-learning, mobile learning, lifelong learning and virtual reality. He is presently assigned to the mobile computing workgroup researching wireless ad hoc computing, although he continues to pursue his interests in computer aided learning. Currently, he is co-editing 3 books to be published this year in the United States. He also serves on the editorial board of 5 journals, the committees of 6 international congresses and serves on the boards of two international organizations.

Marianne Azer
National Telecommunication Institute and Nile University
Egypt

Engineering Education in the Middle East in a Globalization Era
Challenges and Suggested Solutions

The higher education has always been at the frontline of establishing and strengthening a nation. Recent developments in education have been strongly affected with the globalization, namely the interdependence of countries, institutions, economies, and people. Engineering education counts amongst the most important and effective fields of higher education in this critical era. Despite the strong desire for a distinguished internationally recognized engineering education; there are several factors that have a negative impact on this mission and lots of challenges which may affect the students’ achievements in a global context. Now, imagine that you are the dean of one of the schools of engineering in the Middle East, what would be your vision to improve the engineering education at your university, taking into consideration the effects of globalization? You will definitely need to answer some questions such as: What are the motives for your students for choosing Engineering Education? Does the Education that they are currently offered satisfy their needs? What are the challenges that academic institutes majored in Engineering are facing, and how can they be overcome? Isn’t it time to make a major change in your engineering education methodology to cope with the globalization spirit in order to have a more successful future? What are the talents that your students need? How to motivate them to be innovative? What are the main pillars that need to be there in order to have a distinguished internationally recognized graduate engineer with high caliber? Many questions that need lots of answers are there! We should be able by the end of the talk to set a strategy and propose solutions addressing these important challenges.

The speaker

Dr. Marianne Azer is currently an Assistant Professor in both the National Telecommunication Instiute and the Nile University in Cairo. She received her PhD from Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering, Electronics and Communications Department. She also received her MSc. and BSc. from the same university. Her current research is focused on e-learning, engineering education, and security in wireless networks. She has many international peer reviewed publications and was recently awarded from the Academy of Scientific Research in Egypt for her publications. She has been ranked last year as one of the top 10 speakers communicating science in Egypt. She received other fellowships and awards on both National and International levels.

Denis Gillet
Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL)
Switzerland

Personal Learning Environments Where the Web of People and the Internet of Things Can Intersect

In this talk, the potential of personal learning environments to conciliate formal and informal learning, as well as institutionaland personal resources will be discussed. Agile and contextual aggregation and recommendation of online communities and Web apps will also be tackled. A scenario showing how these new paradigms can be integrated in engineering education to enable flexible interaction between peers and smart devices for collaborative experimentation purposes will be drawn. A special attention will be given to pedagogical and technological issues like adoption, personalization, scalability, trust and privacy.

The Speaker

Denis Gillet leads an interdisciplinary research Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). His research interests include Technologies Enhanced Learning (TEL), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Engineering Education, as well as Hierarchical Control of Distributed Systems. His current research focus is on personal learning environments and contextual recommender systems, with applications to on-line engineering education and knowledge management. Dr. Gillet is an Executive of the STELLAR European Network of Excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning. He has also a leading position in the ROLE European Integrated Project on Responsive Open Learning Environments.