Opportunities and challenges in professional education-related faculty development in the US

The authors outline important opportunities and challenges relating to formal education-related faculty development on a large scale. Questions explored are: What major opportunities exist regarding moving towards educational professional qualification for US Higher Education institutions, their faculty and students, industry, and society as a whole? How can resources be synergistically integrated to support such an effort? What are the major challenges or barriers present that must be overcome in order to create such a system? In response to these questions, a concept map is presented to explore how faculty educational development could support and greatly enhance an entire system revolving around faculty development in teaching and learning. Utilizing and reflecting upon the literature, major issues considered that relate to the questions above include various roles in the higher education engineering community; relationships between educational research, student learning outcomes, and engineering faculty; resources supporting engineering education, and the implication of different faculty reward structures. Analysis indicates that pieces already in place offer great potential to create the Engineering Education of 2020 for “The Engineer of 2020” if key barriers are addressed.