This phase 2 project is extending a product of the Phase 1 research both at the original university and in other higher education institutions. The product is a gateway course that surveys an engineering field in part or in its entirety, with equivalent attention to currently topical applications and the broader (social, environmental, cultural, economic) impacts of those applications, while contextualizing professional development outcomes into the instructional design. In this phase 2 project, the three collaborating universities are enabling transferability of the phase 1 intervention by formalizing the process of identifying the comfort zones of both faculty and students to enable successful social learning. The goal of the phase 2 project is to improve cognitive, affective, and meta-cognitive constructs that directly support: 1) increasing the number of women and under-represented minorities in engineering; 2) improving the preparation of engineering graduates for the 21st century workplace (using ABET criteria); 3) increasing the average level of cognitive development of engineering undergraduates; 4) enhancing capacity to work in progressive and collaborative teams; and, 5) upgrading high level awareness of the 21st century high-tech workplace.
