Webster among leading engineering educators invited to National Academy of Engineering symposium

Donald Webster
Webster

Donald Webster will exchange ideas with some of the country’s top engineering educators later this month.

The National Academy of Engineering announced Sept. 7 Webster has been invited to the academy's eighth Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium in Irvine, California, 2 1/2 days where innovative faculty members gather to learn from research and best practices in education. Only 48 engineering teachers nationwide will attend.

“It is a great honor to be selected to attend this year’s symposium,” said Webster, professor and associate chair of administration and finance in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “I greatly appreciate the opportunity to hear about activities that other engineering instructors are employing in their classrooms. I am also hoping to learn about innovative curricular issues in engineering.”

Symposium participants were chosen from what organizers called a “highly competitive pool of applicants” nominated by NAE members and engineering deans.

Webster is one of three Georgia Tech faculty members selected this year. He has become well known on campus for his work on the “flipped classroom” model, where he records lectures for students to watch before class and spends instruction time on problems that reinforce the lecture concepts.

“With today’s unprecedented pace of technological advances and the significant challenges the world faces, engineering education plays a crucial role. But it must reinvent itself in order to produce a larger and more diverse engineering workforce highly capable of innovation and value creation for society,” said Nadine Aubry, chair of the symposium’s advisory committee and dean of the College of Engineering at Northeastern University.

“The Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium provides a forum for creative engineering educators to generate novel approaches, share early implementation schemes, establish a national network, and serve as change agents in their home institutions.”