age 14.132.1 A TExT for Engineering Education in the 21st Century

The traditional lecture format is the predominant teaching method employed in undergraduate engineering education in the United States1, 2. At the same time, concerns are being raised that the effectiveness of engineering education needs to be improved3, 4, and consequently, it has been suggested that teaching methods need to be changed2. Research shows that when active learning is properly implemented and used as a teaching method, it is much more effective than the conventional lecture format4-10. However, most undergraduate engineering instructors do not have much, if any, experience with non-traditional teaching methods such as active learning, either as student or as instructor. As a result, and in light of significant non-teaching demands on their time, many engineering instructors continue to use the traditional lecture approach. For engineering instructors in many fields and areas, the most readily available teaching resource is the textbook they select for use in their course. Textbooks provide for information transfer to the students, assuming the students actually read them. Textbooks usually also provide a wealth of problems and examples that can be used for learning and in assessment. Many also provide tools like computer codes that are useful in solving problems in the field. In most cases, however, textbooks fail to provide resources for teaching the subject in the classroom, and particularly s