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Open Education Resources are pedagogical resources which are available under open licences for reuse and remixing. These resources support collaborative development of education material, the ongoing evolution and improvement of the material and easy access to both educators and students. Several initiatives exist for OER in Canada, and resources specifically targeting engineering are beginning to emerge. At the moment, those efforts are fragmented. In line with the mission to the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA) OER SIG, this paper presents an overview of current Canadian and international Engineering OER initiatives. Based on the findings, several challenges and opportunities pertaining to engineering OER are identified and recommendations are provided for engineering instructors and institutions who wish to increase the use of OER in engineering programs. For instructors, this could be adapting OER where available. For those looking to develop OER, there may be grants and resources at the institutional and provincial levels to support this. For institutions, this may be supporting instructors in using or developing OER through grants or recognition.

The objective of this paper is to document the experience of developing and implementing a second-year course in an engineering professional spine that was developed in a first-tier research university and relies on project-based core courses. The main objective of this spine is to develop the students’ cognitive and employability skills that will allow them to stand out from the crowd of other engineering graduates.The spine was developed and delivered for the first time in the academic year 2010-2011 for first-year general engineering students. In the year 2011-2012, those students joined different programs, and accordingly the second-year course was tailored to align with the different programs’ learning outcomes. This paper discusses the development and implementation of the course in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department.

This paper presents a literature review of social laboratory and network approaches to change, and describes a collaborative approach being implemented in some Canadian engineering programs to rethink the engineering curriculum. As part of the Canadian Engineering Education Challenge in the Engineering Change Lab, the institutions present some proposed curriculum interventions and proposed research activities.