TY - GEN
T1 - The first cohort in a new innovation, leadership, and engineering entrepreneurship B. S. degree program
AU - Newell, Brooke S.
AU - Varshney, Lav R.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/12/12
Y1 - 2017/12/12
N2 - The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has recently launched a new B. S. dual degree in Innovation, Leadership, and Engineering Entrepreneurship (ILEE), a second bachelor's degree option for those completing their degree in a traditional engineering discipline. This is unlike many universities where similar degree programs are situated in colleges of business rather than engineering. The first cohort of sixteen students has joined the program in January 2017. In this paper we first report on the stated goals of the new degree, which is meant to combine the technical expertise in the traditional engineering science-focused disciplines with a deeper set of skills in problem-finding, creativity, innovation, leadership, and externalization. The idea is to ensure training in the dual physical and human dimensions and triple aspects of science, design, and leadership that are present in engineering practice. Next we report on the curriculum design as well as the experiential learning pedagogy that is present in most of the courses therein. Core courses include "Design Thinking/Need-Finding", "Creativity, Innovation, Vision", "Emotional Intelligence", "Innovation and Engineering Design", and "Technology Entrepreneurship". Further, we provide a characterization of the students in the first cohort of undergraduate students to be accepted into the degree program. Drawing on their application materials, we perform text analytics using techniques such as topic modeling under Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and geometric embedding using the word2vec family of methods, to understand the key motivations for students to pursue this degree. Finally we use these text analytics techniques to make a formal assessment of alignment between the stated goals of the degree program and the key motivations of the students. One particular question is to understand the students' relative level of interest in the three legs of the degree, namely innovation, leadership, and entrepreneurship, so as to predict how level of engagement may vary across courses.
AB - The College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has recently launched a new B. S. dual degree in Innovation, Leadership, and Engineering Entrepreneurship (ILEE), a second bachelor's degree option for those completing their degree in a traditional engineering discipline. This is unlike many universities where similar degree programs are situated in colleges of business rather than engineering. The first cohort of sixteen students has joined the program in January 2017. In this paper we first report on the stated goals of the new degree, which is meant to combine the technical expertise in the traditional engineering science-focused disciplines with a deeper set of skills in problem-finding, creativity, innovation, leadership, and externalization. The idea is to ensure training in the dual physical and human dimensions and triple aspects of science, design, and leadership that are present in engineering practice. Next we report on the curriculum design as well as the experiential learning pedagogy that is present in most of the courses therein. Core courses include "Design Thinking/Need-Finding", "Creativity, Innovation, Vision", "Emotional Intelligence", "Innovation and Engineering Design", and "Technology Entrepreneurship". Further, we provide a characterization of the students in the first cohort of undergraduate students to be accepted into the degree program. Drawing on their application materials, we perform text analytics using techniques such as topic modeling under Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and geometric embedding using the word2vec family of methods, to understand the key motivations for students to pursue this degree. Finally we use these text analytics techniques to make a formal assessment of alignment between the stated goals of the degree program and the key motivations of the students. One particular question is to understand the students' relative level of interest in the three legs of the degree, namely innovation, leadership, and entrepreneurship, so as to predict how level of engagement may vary across courses.
KW - Engineering entrepreneurship education
KW - Innovation education
KW - Leadership education
KW - Text analytics
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U2 - 10.1109/FIE.2017.8190631
DO - 10.1109/FIE.2017.8190631
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85043270664
T3 - Proceedings - Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE
SP - 1
EP - 6
BT - FIE 2017 - Frontiers in Education, Conference Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 47th IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, FIE 2017
Y2 - 18 October 2017 through 21 October 2017
ER -