Framework For Developing And Implementing Engineering Design Curricula

For the last eight years, the Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE) consortium has provided leadership in design education by formulating outcome statements, creating instructional materials, and delivering faculty development workshops to help engineering educators respond to ABET expectations in the areas of design, teamwork, and communication. This paper examines the framework used by TIDEE curriculum developers to create and implement over 100 learning activities that appeal to diverse student populations. Key elements of the TIDEE framework include: (1) structured collaborative activities that engage students, (2) explicit attention to procedural and metacognitive knowledge that students can apply in new design team contexts, and (3) integration of formative and summative assessments to elevate learning and to document achievement of key learning outcomes. This paper summarizes the educational philosophy used to create and sequence design-based learning activities that can be downloaded from www.tidee.cea.wsu.edu. Changing Focus of Design Education Engineering education has remained essentially unchanged for decades, with a focus on the teacher and what is taught, in contrast to the student and what is learned. Historically, this approach operates in an open-loop system where teachers pour forth the same content regardless of student needs. The emergence of student-centered classrooms and outcomes assessment in the last decade has profoundly changed the paradigm for teaching and learning across higher education1. Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC 2000) adopted by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), which instituted requirements for outcomes definition and assessment, created serious confusion among engineering educators2,3. This resulted from the limited faculty training in educational concepts such as learning objectives, outcomes, and assessment. As a result, many faculty members displayed limited interest in transforming their educational practices. Other faculty members saw EC 2000 as a catalyst for continuous improvement, but lacked the expertise to modify their course P ge 882.1 Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition. Copyright © 2003, American Society for Engineering Education design and teaching techniques to an outcomes-based environment. The Transferable Integrated Design Engineering Education (TIDEE) consortium was originally formed with NSF funding to provide leadership in lower-division design education3. TIDEE is “an interdisciplinary community of engineering design educators committed to developing, implementing, and refining processes which lead to measurable improvements in the readiness of our graduates for team-based design in the modern workplace.” Over the last eight years TIDEE has provided regional leadership in design education that has resulted in: