Engineering Education

The M.S. in Engineering Education (ENED) prepares graduates for a wide range of career pathways across education, industry, and the public sector. Graduates pursue positions in universities, including traditional engineering disciplines and departments of engineering education, as well as roles in community colleges and PreK–12 educational settings.

Career opportunities also extend to for-profit and nonprofit organizations, such as testing organizations, foundations, and governmental agencies. Graduates are well-positioned for programmatic roles, including assessment and accreditation coordination, curriculum design, policymaking, and program management. Additional pathways include corporate training, workforce development, and leadership roles in teaching and learning centers, diversity initiatives, and outreach programs.

The University of Cincinnati’s graduate program in Engineering Education prepares students for career pathways in academia, industry, or government, depending on their professional goals and area of focus. In consultation with their advisor, students develop expertise in a range of focus areas, including higher education in engineering, PreK–12 engineering education across formal and informal settings (including both for-profit and nonprofit contexts), and engineering industry and workforce development.

A flexible curriculum driven by your interests. Our curriculum is highly flexible and student-driven. Students co-design their plan of study with their advisor to align their graduate experiences with their long-term career goals and professional aspirations following degree completion. We have a small core of 6 credits (ENED7001 Introduction to Engineering Education and Research, ENED7005 Engineering Education Research Design, ENED7006 Ethical Considerations in Conducting Human Subjects Research in Engineering) and a wide range of electives such as ENED7002 Educational Theory and ENED7003 Applications of Pedagogy and Assessment that focus on educational practices tailored specifically to the engineering classroom. 

Experiential activities that can be built into your plan of study to get on-the-job experience (e.g., mentored teaching, …). Aligned with UC’s history of cooperative education, workplace-based experiences that connect classroom learning to authentic roles in whichever industry students want to pursue, students may elect to substitute some of their elective credit with unpaid or paid semester-long experiences. Students have taken this option to be a lead instructor in our first-year program, contribute to the institutional research office through data-driven modeling projects, develop K-12 engineering content for a nationally adopted curriculum, and much more!

Our faculty collectively provide broad expertise across research approaches. Our faculty bring expertise across a wide range of research methodologies, preparing students to be competitive in diverse career pathways. These broad areas include quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research.

Faculty support students in developing expertise in quantitative research, including measurement and the statistical, mathematical, or numerical analysis of data to examine patterns, relationships, and trends. This work may also incorporate machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other engineering-driven techniques to address longstanding educational research problems at scale.

We also offer mentorship in qualitative research, which focuses on generating in-depth descriptions and interpretations of human experiences and behaviors through methods such as interviews, observations, and document analysis.

In addition, our faculty support students in becoming mixed methods researchers, integrating quantitative and qualitative approaches to leverage the strengths of both and develop more comprehensive and nuanced understandings than either method alone.