These Are My People

Since starting as an Assistant Professor at Ohio Northern University (ONU) in Fall 2012, my first engagement with KEEN occurred during the first semester while teaching Electric Circuits. 

Firas Hassan was awarded a KEEN course module grant by ONU to add an extra credit design project to his section of Electric Circuits that involved students pitching a customer-specific value proposition for their design of a temperature sensor. After learning about KEEN from discussions with Firas and Ken Reid, I helped Firas develop that project and implemented it also in my section. Firas, Khalid Al-Olimat, and I published a Frontiers in Education (FIE) paper on the experience in 2013, which at the time of this writing has six citations per Google Scholar.

Workshops & Course Projects

In June 2014, I attended the week-long ICE workshop held at the University of New Haven. Although much of the material was repeated from the one-day abridged workshop, attending the full ICE workshop required the development of a project or module during the workshop that would be implemented in the following academic year. 

Working on the proposed course modifications with Grant Hoffman, Garrett Clayton, Vladimir Labay, Malcolm Daniels, and Eric Brisart was very helpful, and provided a great opportunity to share experiences with KEEN faculty outside of ONU. The two course projects I developed through the ICE workshop were implemented in the senior-level Electrical Engineering course System Design, which is a 1-credit lab course that is entirely project driven. In fact, those projects have run for a number of years with other faculty teaching them, including Firas and Ajmal Khan. 

The better of the two projects, the Wondermill electric grain mill redesign, was the focus of a 2015 ASEE Illinois-Indiana Section Conference paper.

Starting in Fall 2014, JD asked me to join the KEEN committee at ONU to replace Ken Reid as the ECCS Department representative. Working directly with JD on KEEN related activities and planning has been a very rewarding mentorship experience for me, which has helped to further my understanding of the EM. 

Also starting in Fall 2014, Vladimir Labay served his sabbatical at ONU for the 2014-15 academic year. During the Fall 2014 semester, we modified the circuits extra-credit KEEN project with the help of Vladimir, Nesreen, and Firas so that students were allowed to pick from one of four circuits project on which to focus their design and business case for the pitch competition. Although I did not teach the circuits course in Fall 2014, I helped with the judging of the pitch competition and we wrote another paper on the experience, presented at the 2015 ASEE national conference in Seattle by Vladimir.

Connections

Participating in Bryan’s small group grant on Curiosity led me to pursue leading a KEEN small group grant on Creating Connections during the Fall of 2015. The meetings focused on the book, Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights, by Gary Klein, and planned discussion questions and activities were centered on insight creation, impediments to insights, and the importance of creating connections to form insights. 

Many of the participants were the same as Bryan’s group, which led to a good continuity of discussion. The leadership experience for me in executing the grant as Principal Investigator (PI) was formative in my development as a faculty member.

With the additional funds left over from the grant, I was able to host a junior faculty luncheon in which all of the junior faculty were invited to discuss career development opportunities within KEEN. JD was also invited to the luncheon to give advice to junior faculty.

Community Groups

I attended the KEEN Fall Meeting of 2015 and presented some of my work in “EML Breakout Session on Circuits, Signals and Controls”, with Alan Cheville and Pali Singh. I also attended the 2016 KEEN Winter Conference where I presented several posters on the EML Projects in Electrical Engineering Courses on which I have worked. Also for the 2016 KEEN Winter Conference, Don Carpenter invited me to serve on a panel for “KEEN Career Advancement” where I discussed the KEEN opportunities that have led to success in my development as a faculty member. 

Much of the discussion at those two conferences centered around the idea of community groups (formerly known as subnets), which led me to submit a proposal entitled “Strategic Directions for a KEEN Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE) Group”. Although this proposal was not funded, the Foundation ultimately held group meetings hosted at the Foundation the following fall, during which strategic directions for groups were explored.