Capstone Design Hub: Building the Capstone Design Community

Capstone design courses are common across engineering programs nationwide. Yet, many departments and programs rely on one faculty member or a small handful of faculty members to teach their capstone design course. As a result these faculty members find themselves isolated, with limited mechanisms for sharing ideas and networking with peers who have similar responsibilities and concerns. This paper reports on the ongoing efforts to support the broader capstone design community through the development of the Capstone Design Hub (CDHub) as a web resource for capstone design programs. The features and structure of the CDHub are being developed through capstone faculty input, including results from a survey of the capstone community. To build awareness of the CDHub as well as to solicit additional feedback from the community, this paper describes development of the hub to meet community needs, initial population of the hub with resources focused on communication, and plans for continued expansion of the hub. Introduction: The Need for a Capstone Hub The inaugural National Capstone Design Course Conference was held in June 2007 to bring together, for the first time, a broad range of capstone design faculty from across the country and even internationally. About 170 faculty, students, administrators, and industry representatives discussed, shared, and learned about capstone design throughout the conference. The enthusiasm from this conference led to a second conference in June 2010; the 2010 Capstone Design Conference included roughly 200 attendees from 89 institutions, representing a wide spectrum of engineering disciplines and capstone design programs. The 2012 Capstone Design Conference is scheduled for May 30-June 1, 2012, and plans are in place to hold such conferences biennially with the conference themes evolving to promote continued discussions and collaboration. One outcome of the 2010 Capstone Design Conference was consensus recognition of the need for better documentation and dissemination of effective practices and other resources across multiple aspects of capstone design programs. Recent survey results suggest that capstone faculty do not tend to actively participate in discussions around design education, whether through attending conferences or education-based workshops, reading design education literature, or engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning through publishing. As a result, the extensive body of scholarship on effective design teaching that has been presented at conferences such as ASEE and published in academic journals has failed to make its way into capstone classroom practice in any sustained or systemic way. Yet surveys also show a high consensus around core topics, including communication, as well as commonalities in team structures, desired learning outcomes, and course goals, suggesting that many faculty could benefit from shared resources, and that new capstone faculty in particular may not need to "reinvent the wheel" when they take on capstone courses. Given these course commonalities, the relative isolation of capstone faculty within departments, and the atypical nature of the capstone learning environment that depends more strongly on mentoring than traditional lecturing, the authors of this paper are developing a Capstone Design Hub (CDHub), with initial funding from the Engineering Information Foundation. The CDHub is intended to serve as a web resource for capstone faculty to provide centralized access to effective tools and practices developed by teachers and researchers across the country, beginning with tools to facilitate the development of students' communication skills, as discussed below. Design of the Hub: Requirements and Specifications