Self-Guided Professional Development as an Enabler for Multidisciplinary Programs

The capstone design program at Colorado School of Mines serves three departments and four degree programs, each having their own demands, distinctive industry-specific languages, and departmental expectations. Each discipline is looking to the capstone design program to provide ABET required capstone projects and assessment, professional practice training, and instruction in multiple discipline specific design tools and techniques to their students. This paper describes the use of student-specific professional development plans, in combination with a menu of online content modules, in order to embrace the unique needs of each discipline while enabling multidisciplinary collaboration in a single course. While this is an early effort to assess the modules, initial surveys suggest that students and faculty value the modules’ content and feel that overall the quality and length of module production is good. Future work will assess the utility and application of the modules to their design projects.