Empowering Engineering Faculty and adminstrators

In the article of "Creating a Culture for Scholarly and Systematic Innovation in Engineering Education", they talked about focusing on engineering faculty and administrators as the major changing agents for the increase of attention to teaching. In Educating the engineer of 2020, it specifically talked about the front-line role of engineering faculty member in supporting the engineering education innovations. We (Tommy, Marc, Junaid and I) discussed about why there is still not much increase in the emphasis on teaching innovation. Although we have realized that the present faculty reward system is very research-oriented, it has not moved much towards the teaching side.

I think the reason for the lack of this shift is still about the "customers" of our educational systems. Are the administrators really care about "students" as our "customers"? Are they really care about "educating people"? Or maybe in a sense, the administrators don't think students are the actual consumers of educational systems. Instead, whether or not research funding are brought in is more important than whether or not the professors are teaching the students in a better way. The point is whether we want to change or not depends on where our values are set upon.