A Carle Illinois College of Medicine professor has been tapped by a prestigious exchange program to help advance engineering education abroad. CI MED Teaching Professor Ann-Perry Witmer has been selected for the Fulbright Specialist international exchange program to help guide the implementation of project-based learning at Haute Ecole Louvain en Hainaut (HELHA), a university in Belgium.
Witmer was chosen for her expertise in both engineering and the project-based learning (PBL) approach to education, a cornerstone of CI MED’s engineering-based medical curriculum. PBL learning challenges students to identify real-world problems and design solutions.
“As we already know at CI MED, project-based learning provides a strong foundation for understanding complex concepts by grounding them in real-life situations,” Witmer said. “We do this at CI MED through a variety of educational opportunities for our students, but the traditions of engineering education often discourage thinking about the messiness of real life in favor of theoretical understanding of scientific knowledge.” CI MED’s physician-innovators are immersed in project-based learning early on in their medical school careers, culminating in their fourth-year Capstone projects, in which they collaborate with engineering and business students to design and prototype a health care solution.
HELHA has already committed to incorporating PBL within its engineering curriculum, but Witmer will help the school’s engineering faculty refine their implementation plans. “I’ll be working broadly across the engineering faculty to help assess what’s being done now, how PBL can be incorporated into more courses, and how faculty can better use the learning method to engage students and improve their understanding of engineering principles and practices,” Witmer said. She will spend two weeks in Belgium this summer to work directly with educators on identifying and implementing improvements.
“Because one of the goals is to create consistency in the application of this approach across courses and disciplines, I’ll be drawing upon my research into contextual engineering to identify conditions that encourage or deter application of PBL in each classroom,” Witmer said. She has authored a book titled Contextual Engineering: Translating User Voice into Design, which will inform her work in Belgium and at CI MED. “My research in engineering at Illinois has strongly demonstrated that design outcomes are more sustainable when situated in context and I’m looking forward to extending this research into the area of health care as well, and it’s exciting to be able to share our research group’s findings with other scholars around the world.”
The Fulbright program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government to share the expertise of U.S. scholars with countries around the globe.
Witmer’s previous work has often taken an international perspective. She has been involved in humanitarian engineering work, helping to create service organizations that designed and installed engineered infrastructure with communities in Central America and the Caribbean. Her project travels have taken her to Central America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America.
Ann-Perry Witmer is a teaching associate professor in CI MED’s Department of Biomedical and Translational Sciences and a medical education facilitator. She is the 2024 recipient of the 2024 Ben and Georgeann Jones Excellence in Teaching Award from U. of I.’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), where she also holds a faculty appointment.