He urged us to prepare engineers who are competent enough to work independently and as members of team projects. Our students must learn how to meld engineering science and practice. Due to historical changes in the making, engineers of today and tomorrow require multidisciplinary approaches and an integrating, broad perspective. He concluded with a warning to prepare our students for long-term careers rather than short term marketability with the risk of becoming commodities. My conclusion is that the warning also applies for faculty.
Distance learning poses the risk of turning faculty and courses into commodities.
This goal of the workshop provided many useful tips for allowing a faculty to perform the two or more full-time demands on our time within one lifetime without shortening the length of that lifetime catastrophically. The key point is that a group of faculty, organized as a department for example, can operate much more effectively, efficiently, humanely, and happily, when the group functions as a team. This is, of course, what we teach our students, so it is logical that it applies to us too. Course preparation offers one of the largest untapped resources of wasted faculty time. Students are typically worse victims of new preparations than faculty, because the faculty member typically learns more the first time through the course than the students do.