Dr. Karan Watson's Talk about Change in Engineering Education

I watched this awesome talk by Dr. Karan Watson on YouTube. I am not sure whether other folks have already watched it, since it's been there for a while. Just want to share :)

She talks about "Change". She says we are talking about changing engineering education since a hundred years ago, but the large engineering enterprise simply does not listen to us. The motivation for change today is a creeping crisis that never raise the alarm as mentioned by William Wulf. We engineering education researchers have showed our data again and again and again that our ways are better, but the change simply does not happen, because sometimes culture cannot be changed by data, authentication or facts. What we are doing should not be regarded as science, because “consensus, emotions, and traditions are not changed by proofs”. Culture is a result of daily conversations. We need to be contagious about our ideas.

“If you claim you are going to change engineering education, then recognize that you are going to create a storm.” She mentions an analogy made by Peter Russell: when you face with a storm that is caused by change, you need to be more like a tree. You need to be able to bend when the wind gets strong, you need to have deep root in the discipline, across disciplines, in pedagogy, in engineering, and in change, and you need other trees.

She also talks about balancing the reward system between research and teaching.

I feel it's really an awesome talk.