The Scholarship Horizons In Engineering Technology: Choosing The Best Path

The issue of scholarship in Engineering Technology (ET) is becoming an important topic of discussion within the ET community due to the evolving missions of many institutions that host Engineering Technology programs. Many of these institutions now require some form of documented scholarship from their ET faculty for promotion and tenure purposes, and it is incumbent upon the ET community to support these faculty by defining not only the meaning of scholarship in ET, but also the yardstick by which such scholarship will be assessed. This issue is pertinent to ET because our programs are traditionally of an applied nature with a focus on practice-oriented education. It is therefore logical to expect that ET scholarship should take on an applied flavor and involve our constituencies (students and industry) in meaningful ways. To define ET scholarship from within the ET community and to develop an appropriate ET faculty workload model, the Engineering Technology Council (ETC) formed a Task Force on ET Scholarship at the ETLI Conference in October 2002 in Norfolk, Virginia. The group was charged to report back to the ETC by June of 2003 at the ASEE Annual Conference in Nashville. In this paper, the authors will discuss what ET scholarship involves, the importance and relevance of ET scholarship, appropriate Evaluation of ET scholarship, Faculty Workload (teaching, scholarship and service) Model(s), and the Challenges and Opportunities of ET scholarship. A web-based literature survey is carried out to determine the faculty workload policy that currently exists at various colleges and universities across the country, and this information is used in developing the proposed ET faculty workload model presented in this paper.