Three days at Swarthmore College, 15–17 June, for NETI-1: Course Design and Student Management, alongside a cohort of engineering faculty from a wide range of institutions.
The premise of the workshop is one worth stating plainly, because it is not how most engineering courses get built: you decide first what a student should be able to do by the end, then write the assessments that would show it, and only then decide what to cover. Content last, not first. Sitting in a room of people working through that in the same week is a different experience from reading about it.
Two things it connected to directly. The graduate finite element course was being assembled over the same summer, and it opened in the fall with an open textbook written as it runs — a course whose spine is error control needs its assessments to ask for judgment about error, not for solver operation, and that is a design question before it is a content question. And the undergraduate courses already lean that way: the Applied FEA task asks students to defend a modelling choice and demonstrate convergence rather than to produce a picture, and Machine Design adds a fatigue condition to a spring problem so that a change in a mechanics formula visibly changes the feasible set.
The claim the education page makes is that the discipline being taught is the one being researched. Making that true takes deliberate course design, not good intentions.
