Engineering Pathway

Engineering Pathway (EP), the engineering education wing of the NSDL, focused this year on updating, expanding and creating services – News and Events, Search Appliance, Collections, Annotated Textbooks, Memberships and Sponsorships – to support our future sustainability goals. EP also saw substantially increased usage of its website this year.

Collections: The creation of a collection provides an opportunity to increase the visibility of educational resources in computing and engineering education communities. They are also a means to address funding agency requests for dissemination of educational materials.

Annotated Textbooks: The Engineering Pathway is a digital library of over 10,000 educational resources in computing and engineering. We can link these resources to context-sensitive keywords in the outline of textbooks as a value- added service for both faculty and students. See http://www.k-grayengineeringeducation.org/textbooks for examples of EP annotated textbooks.

Memberships and Sponsorships: Memberships are available at many levels, from Honoris – annual sponsorship of a single community page, to Summa Cum Laude – a full five year sponsorship of all Engineering Pathway services. Community sponsorship provides logo and product placement, workshops, blogs, etc.

EP substantially grew its user base in both content and functionality. We have more than 6,000 registered users and had more than 1.5 million page views in September 2009. Our disciplinary pages are typically in the top 10 for all major ABET disciplines under both Google and Yahoo searches. The number of catalog records increased by more than five-fold from 2,408 engineering-relevant resources in October 2005 to 14,112 as of March 31, 2009.

EP continues to host awards for excellence in courseware and curriculum. The 2009 Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware winners were CATME/Team-Maker and SimSE. For more information, please see http://www.engineeringpathway.org/premier. The inaugural Premier Curriculum Award for K-12 Engineering was awarded to Susan Powers and Jan DeWaters of Clarkson University for their outstanding original middle school curricular unit, Energy Systems and Solutions.