Investigating an Asynchronous Model for Incorporating Social Aspects of Engineering Work into Engineering Design Courses

This paper describes an implementation study of the Social Engagement Toolkit (SET), a library of trainings on various topics related to socially engaged design and engineering. The customizable SET trainings include asynchronous hybrid learning blocks intended to facilitate instruction on socially engaged engineering topics by non-expert instructors in a range of engineering courses, as well as live expert instruction and entirely virtual instruction, developed for online courses in the 2020-2021 academic year. The SET seeks to foster much-needed socially engaged engineering skills among undergraduate engineering students, while addressing potential barriers to curricular change, such as instructor motivation and prior training. We examined the incorporation of the SET into multiple sections of a senior-level capstone course and a project-based introduction to engineering course to understand the experiences of early adopter faculty and their students. This paper describes faculty's motivations for and their experiences with implementing the SET in their classes, strengths and challenges of the toolkit, and the perceived influence on and relevance to students' course work and future academic and professional plans.