Work in progress: Promoting the use of standards by faculty through improved access

Abstract

Technical standards can provide an effective instructional scaffold for undergraduate engineering coursework, and exposing engineering students to appropriate standards is one of the requirements for program accreditation by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). However, providing access to standards can be challenging for academic libraries due to their expense and the restrictions imposed by publishers on borrowing these documents from other libraries. As a first step towards improving access to standards for students and faculty at Oakland University (OU), the use of standards by faculty in their teaching and research is investigated via survey research. It is hoped that this study will not only provide guidance on which standards are the highest priority for access by our affiliates, but will also yield insight into how standards are being integrated into coursework in the engineering curriculum at OU.