Special Interest Groups

The mandate of the Design Education and Communication SIG is to foster the creation of a community of practice surrounding engineering design education in Canada. This will provide a setting for the discussion, evaluation and development of strategies, tools and methods for teaching engineering design and supporting students in learning engineering through design.. A particular focus will be the transfer of knowledge between educators in order to share best practices and identify common areas of interest for new directions in design education.

1. Provide resources to educators to improve engineering design education
   • Develop a repository of design focused teaching material
   • Identify best practices for teaching and evaluation of design and related areas, such as critical thinking, decision making and  communication
   • Disseminate best practices via appropriate channels, such as CEEA
2. Facilitate knowledge transfer from research to practice
   • Identify current knowledge gaps
   • Provide a forum for discussing and synthesizing relevant research
3. Facilitate a Community of Practice for Engineering Design Educators to share and build upon past experiences
   • Identify areas of interest for current educators
   • Develop and communicate an understanding of the design education landscape in Canada
   • Facilitate collaboration between design educators on new educational initiatives
   • Promote the development of cross-departmental and cross-faculty of multidisciplinary student design projects, in recognition of the need for engineers to collaborate with and learn from engineers from other disciplines as well as non-engineers.

To enhance the capacity for engineering education research in Canada.

Activities: 

1. Advocating for engineering education research funding, working with NCDEAS, NSERC, SSHRC, and the federal government.
2. Developing skills and expertise for engineering education research in Canada
3. Identifying what are the engineering education research priorities in Canada
4. Connecting to other SIGs, like to Engineer 2050

To facilitate discussion on the identity and attributes of the Engineer of 2050, who will both shape and respond to future global trends.  This understanding will be facilitated through input from engineering educators, administrators, students and professional organizations on the future of technological development and the engineering profession. Activities include leveraging literature and resources to inform, guide and support new thought about the future of engineers and the profession, and sharing of resources to formulate ideas about the future and develop new engineering education strategies.  Findings will be disseminated to the CEEA-ACEG membership, engineering institutions, the profession and other interested stakeholders.

The goal of the Engineering Competition Teams SIG is to foster discussion related to the experiential learning opportunities provided by engineering design competitions and the best ways in which these competitions can be set up and used within and outside the engineering curriculum to maximize their educational potential.

Organizing engineering competition symposium for leaders.

The mandate of the Entrepreneurship SIG is to create a Community of Practice (CoP) around engineering entrepreneurship education in Canada.  This will provide a community to share discussions, insights, methods, tools, strategies and future pathways in supporting engineering students in developing entrepreneurial and innovation mindset.  We recognize that this mindset may be implemented through the creation of innovation-based ventures in either start-ups or existing organizations.  And inventory of all engineering schools’ courses and programs centred about entrepreneurship and business will form part of the basis for the sharing and collaboration of learning cycles, best practices and approaches in teaching entrepreneurship.

A. Create opportunities specifically for educating engineering students:

1. for pedagogy and andragogy development of entrepreneurship
2. for experiential learning
3. for interdisciplinary-based team formation and learning
4. for promotion of engineering entrepreneurship across Canada
5. for transition from engineering product development to technology-based business development

B. Facilitate the generation of new practice from research to practice:

1. Identify current knowledge gaps in engineering entrepreneurship education to develop opportunities and resources and fill the knowledge gaps
2. Provide a community and platform for potential national collaboration on relevant research

For many within the CEEA/ACEG community, intentional enhancement of an educators’ knowledge, competency and comfort with equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) concepts, frameworks and integration is a key component to this mission. The EDI SIG serves as a space for interested CEEA members to engage in conversations about equity in their operational context within engineering education. Acknowledging that membership of the EDI SIG will consist of individuals with varying working knowledge and comfort with EDI frameworks, the SIG encourages members to:

• Share best or emerging practices for inclusive pedagogy, outreach, student/faculty support or access pathways
• Highlight equity initiatives happening within member institutions within CEEA
• Discuss EDI integration challenges and barriers they are personally facing or have heard others mention
• Critically discuss and examine engineering pedagogy itself through an equity lens

The EDI SIG is not positioned to be an advisory committee or implementation group for EDI initiatives for the CEEA Board. However, the EDI SIG acts as an advocate for its membership to the CEEA Board in order to highlight areas of concerns and development within the organization at the intersection of EDI and engineering education. The EDI SIG is also committed to sharing any resources curated and/or developed within the SIG community to the broader organization

First Year Engineering SIG aims to create a space for the professionals interested in First Year Engineering. The SIG aims to bring together faculty members from various engineering institutions to exchange ideas.

GAPNet stands for Graduate Attributes Professionals Network. The group is made up of professionals tasked with supervising, managing, coordinating, guiding and/or directing the Graduate Attribute and Continuous Improvement Process at Accredited Engineering Programs across Canada. They collaborate by offering support to one another with examples, advice and assistance regarding all things related to Accreditation and Continuous Improvement.

The Engineering and Humanities SIG creates space for those who study the intersections of engineering and humanities, those who teach at these intersections, and non-engineers who bring their perspectives to engineering environments. We hold monthly or bimonthly online meetings and an annual meetup at the CEEA-AĆEG conference. We also typically host a workshop or roundtable on topics of concern (i.e. sociotechnical thinking, STEAM, etc.) at the conference, and this year is no different: we’ll inspire teaching strategies at the Case Studies as Storytelling workshop, and provide a forum to discuss concepts in transdisciplinary engineering education at the Finding a Loose Home for Boundary Concepts in Engineering Education collaboratorium. In 2024/2025 we’ll continue the conversations we start at CEEA-AĆEG via regular meetings, and will be working towards a paper sharing the insights we’ve gathered in our recent collaboratoriums.

The Math SIG aims to be a community of practice for teachers of mathematics for engineers. We want to be able to examine the dichotomy of mathematics courses. On the one hand, there is a mathematical need for rigor that calls for teaching by a mathematician. On the other, there is a need to be able to model mathematically and connect the material with individual engineering disciplines, which is best taught by an engineer.

With monthly discussions, we want to be able to bring these two camps closer together, so that each becomes stronger in teaching the other side.

As a practical goal for the SIG, we would like to begin the creation of a set of resources that will provide instructors with non-trivial examples of topics in mathematics, applied to specific branches of engineering

To support the development, use, and dissemination of open educational resources (OER) for engineering, and provide central place for CEEA-ACEG members to find collaborators for OER projects among other Canadian engineering educators.

OER includes both open access resources (those that are available for use as a whole work but not modification) and open source resources (those that are available for both use and modification, and sometimes re-publishing with modifications). Resources may include images, textbooks, lecture slides, computer code, videos, artifacts, CAD files, homework problems, etc.

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) may be defined as the systematic investigation and reflection by an instructor into student learning that is shared with other educators.  SoTL practitioners have a curiosity and desire to improve learning in their own classroom, which they share with others.  Its main purpose is to inform practice rather than to develop or refine theory.

The goal of this SIG is to help engineering educators connect with other engineering educators and the broader SoTL community.

The Student Lab SIG is a space for undergraduate and graduate students in Canada passionate about improving engineering education through research and practice. Our goal as a community is to alleviate the challenges associated with being a student by creating a national network of students that support, collaborate, and learn together as progress in our individual journeys.

Through our meetings, we have opportunities for check-ins, sharing experiences, discussing challenges, and sharing resources. We also have themed discussions on topics important to our success as students in EER, we run accountability sessions for mutual encouragement and support, and we also occasionally share academic materials such as abstracts, presentations, and proposals, for peer feedback.

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The purpose of the Sustainability in Engineering Education (SEE) Special Interest Group (SIG) is to advance systematic integration of sustainability into engineering curricula and learning environments across Canada. Research highlights that sustainability education requires systems thinking, ethics, and interdisciplinary competencies that are not yet consistently embedded in engineering programs. This SIG aims to address this lack of consistency of sustainability integration and aligns with the CEEA’s mission for continuous improvement in education. The focus of this SIG would be to embed sustainability as core to engineering education, rather than for context or as a supplementary topic. The SEE-SIG will assemble and support educators, researchers, academic leaders, students and industry partners to collaboratively develop and disseminate approaches for teaching sustainability in engineering. This scope include curriculum design that include learners at all levels and stages of their professional education and follows Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board accreditation alignment.

Le GIS sur la durabilité en éducation du génie (SEE, pour Sustainability in Engineering Education) a comme objectif de favoriser l’intégration systématique de la durabilité dans les programmes et les environnements d’apprentissage en génie partout au Canada. Les recherches soulignent que l’enseignement de la durabilité exige des compétences en pensée systémique, en éthique et en interdisciplinarité, qui ne sont pas encore intégrées de manière cohérente dans les programmes de génie. Ce GIS vise à remédier à ce manque de cohérence dans l’intégration de la durabilité et s’inscrit dans la mission d’amélioration continue de l’éducation de l’ACÉG. Il se concentrera sur l’intégration de la durabilité comme élément central de la formation en génie, plutôt que comme simple contexte ou sujet complémentaire. Le GIS SEE rassemblera et soutiendra des enseignants, des chercheurs, des responsables universitaires, des étudiants et des partenaires de l’industrie afin qu’ils élaborent et diffusent ensemble des approches pour enseigner la durabilité en génie. Sa portée comprend la conception de programmes d’études qui s’adressent aux apprenants de tous les niveaux et à toutes les étapes de leur formation professionnelle, dans le respect des exigences d’agrément du Bureau canadien d’agrément des programmes de génie (BCAPG).

• Construct communities of practice, with goals of integrating sustainability across engineering disciplines at all program levels
• Engage communities and industry so real-world challenges are addressed with sustainability education
• Support faculty development and build capacity towards effective sustainability instruction
• Promote research, scholarship and learning outcomes on sustainability within engineering
• Collaborate among institutional priorities, accreditation requirements and societal needs
• Curate frameworks and pedagogical approaches for operationalizing sustainability

This SIG complements existing CEEA-ACÉG SIGs like the Engineer of 2050 and SELM. The SEE-SIG will focus on current curriculum transformation to achieve sustainability competencies. This focus prepares engineers for future challenges, decision-making and management practices.

Preliminary activities of the SEE-SIG include setting short-term and long-term goals and deliverables. Pursuits could include conference workshops / sessions, panels / roundtables, research projects, mentorship and initiating shared repositories of material related to sustainability in engineering education. Later, once established, the SEE-SIG hopes to transform engineering education through nurturing engineering graduates with values that meaningfully contribute to a resilient society.

• Constituer des communautés de pratique visant à intégrer la durabilité dans toutes les disciplines du génie et à tous les niveaux des programmes
• Mobiliser les collectivités et l’industrie afin que l’enseignement de la durabilité réponde à des défis concrets
• Soutenir le perfectionnement du corps professoral et renforcer sa capacité à enseigner efficacement la durabilité
• Promouvoir la recherche et les résultats d’apprentissage liés à la durabilité en génie
• Favoriser la concertation entre les priorités des établissements, les exigences d’agrément et les besoins de la société
• Rassembler des cadres de référence et des approches pédagogiques pour concrétiser la durabilité

Ce GIS est complémentaire aux autres GIS de l’ACÉG, comme Ingénieur de 2050 et SELM. Le GIS SEE se concentrera sur la transformation actuelle des programmes en vue de développer des compétences en durabilité. Cette orientation prépare les ingénieurs aux défis futurs, à la prise de décision et aux pratiques de gestion.

Les activités préliminaires du GIS SEE comprennent la définition d’objectifs et de livrables à court et à long terme. Parmi les pistes envisagées: des ateliers et des séances lors de conférences, des tables rondes, des projets de recherche, du mentorat et la création de répertoires communs de ressources sur la durabilité dans la formation en génie. À terme, une fois établi, le GIS SEE espère transformer la formation en génie en formant des diplômés dont les valeurs contribuent concrètement à une société résiliente.

Fostering engineering leadership and management best practice development, research, and program development to operationalize sustainability in engineering education and practice.

Engineered systems are often complex. The sustainable design and operation of complex systems are often done via an organization. As a discipline, engineering leadership and management studies the intersection of the human and technical requirements for the effective and sustainable operation of these complex systems.

The goal of the Sustainable Engineering Leadership and Management (SELM) SIG is to foster engineering leadership and management best practice development, research, and program development to operationalize sustainability in engineering education and practice.  We look to achieve this by:

• Building networks and relationships with Canadian and international SIG members who are teaching and conducting research on leadership, management and sustainability.
• Sharing continual improvement strategies from university and industry contexts to enhance engineering leadership and management programs in Canada.
• Fostering a sense of personal growth, reflection, and influence in engineering.

Highlighting the importance of engineers’ significant impact on society—enabling our students, colleagues and industry partners to transcend the restricted notion that engineers exclusively solve problems framed by others.