Preparing For Participation In Speed: An Asee Initiative For A Nationally Recognized Development Program For Engineering Educators

For the past century, many organizations have published visions of what the technological needs will be in the future for the United States and how the engineering profession might change to meet those needs. There has also been a long-standing call to strengthen engineering and technology educators' capabilities and preparation to perform the task of educating students. A recent response to this call is SPEED: Strengthening the Performance of Engineering and Engineering Technology Educators across the Disciplines. SPEED is a concept for a nationally recognized professional development program supported by ASEE for engineering and engineering technology educators. In this paper, the authors describe the rationale behind the SPEED program, review related international activities, discuss opportunities and challenges for such programs in the United States, and explain SPEED's potential. The authors explicitly wish to use this paper as a platform to initiate a dialogue within ASEE about the SPEED concept.