The Center for Infrastructure Transformation and Education (CIT-E) is made up of civil and environmental engineering programs seeking to improve the coverage of infrastructure content in their curricula. Through the CIT-E collaborative, infrastructure course materials created at two institutions have been made available to partner institutions across the country. Faculty members have integrated these course materials into new and existing civil and environmental engineering, and general studies courses. First time infrastructure course instructors are supported through mentoring from CIT-E faculty members who developed the materials and have experience with teaching an infrastructure course. Additionally, the CIT-E team is providing faculty development around designing an infrastructure course that incorporates active learning strategies through the use of the flipped classroom model.
The NSF-sponsored CIT-E project is being evaluated in many ways; this paper will report on aspects of the evaluation related to the usage patterns of the existing materials and on preliminary findings related to the CIT-E collaborative. Through faculty surveys and interviews, evaluators examined use of CIT-E course materials and also gathered feedback on the materials and on support for implementing an infrastructure course. Evaluators also examined successes and challenges for first time implementers, and looked at the impacts of participating in a community of practice around infrastructure education.
Formative evaluation findings indicated that participating in the CIT-E community is allowing instructors with a shared vision for infrastructure education to share ideas, collaborate on materials and course development and support one another in implementing new courses at their institutions. Instructors teaching an infrastructure course for the first time value having access to previously developed course materials to help them begin to plan and structure the course. CIT-E materials provide a course template that instructors can modify to best meet the needs of their student populations and geographic regions. Instructors are modifying materials to incorporate local current issues in infrastructure to make them geographically relevant. The paper concludes with successes, challenges and lessons learned related to creating a community of practice around infrastructure education.
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