Auburn's LITEE collaborates with University of Santiago

In the fall, the Laboratory for Innovative Technology and Engineering Education (LITEE) at Auburn University headed to Chile to conduct a workshop in collaboration with Mario Letelier, director of the Center for Research in Creativity and Higher Education at the University of Santiago.

LITEE, the brainchild of Auburn University professors P.K. Raju, Thomas Walter Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Chetan Sankar, Thomas Walter Professor, Department of Management, is widely recognized for programs that utilize case studies, multimedia information technologies, and cross-disciplinary teaming to bring real-world problem solving experience to students.

The workshop is part of an initiative supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for cooperative efforts with Chile to test and fine tune Spanish versions of a LITEE case study and associated competency materials for use in Chile and the U.S. This effort is designed to identify materials that enable Hispanic students to better relate and understand engineering principles, thereby increasing retention and success in engineering programs and increasing the diversity of the U.S. engineering workforce.

Fifty participants including deans, department heads, and senior faculty from a variety of engineering institutions in Chile attended the two-day conference. Keynote speaker Susan Kemnitzer, deputy director of the National Science Foundation Division of Engineering Education and Centers, discussed the importance of recruiting and retaining Hispanic and other minority students into engineering.

Other members of the U.S. delegation included Jorge Valenzuela, Auburn faculty member in industrial and systems engineering; Carol Shubin, faculty member in mathematics at California State University Northridge; and Carmen Teresa Villarreal, general manager for Catavia Kids.

"LITEE instructional materials have proven very useful in our classrooms and have helped us meet ABET 2000 criteria, which Chilean engineering education is moving toward adopting," explains Letelier. "The workshop was very timely, appropriate and useful as Chile works through these reforms in engineering education."

According to Raju, funding from a second NSF grant will be used to address problems that occur when engineers in the U.S. are called upon to work with their counterparts around the world to service customers, manage research teams, improve business processes and produce quality products.

Raju and Sankar visited India in December 2004 and have established a working relationship with Gopichand Katragadda, research manager of General Electric's (GE) John F. Welch Technology Center in Bangalore, India, and with A. Ramachandriah, civil engineering faculty member at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India. Katragadda visited Auburn University in August; Ramachandriah in October.

LITEE will team with Ramachandriah and industries such as GE to document issues that commonly arise in collaborative design projects and to provide engineering students from both countries with the tools to address them.

The ultimate goal of the grant is to identify and obtain the resources needed to develop a multimedia case study on collaborative global design for use in classrooms in India and the U.S. to prepare students for the real-world challenges posed by cross-border commercial ventures.

LITEE, founded in 1996, has developed numerous award-winning multimedia case studies in partnership with industry to bring real-world engineering problems into the classroom. These case studies illustrate in detail how an industrial problem is analyzed and a solution found, and enable students to develop a solution and compare it to the solution used by a company.

Research on the use of case studies as a classroom tool has shown that they improve higher-level cognitive skills and encourage interest in engineering as a field of study. Women and minorities respond particularly well to the case study approach.

The NSF grants are jointly funded by the International Division and the Division of Undergraduate Education. LITEE is a joint effort of Auburn University's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and College of Business. Learn more at www.auburn.edu/research/litee.