Development and Implementation of a Cornerstone Course: Engineering Opportunities

In response to the vision presented in the Engineer of 2020 Project, many engineering educators are redesigning courses and curriculum to provide students with opportunities to conceive, design, and implement engineering solutions to complex global issues. This paper describes the development and assessment of a redesigned first year cornerstone course called Engineering Opportunities. The motivation for the course redesign was to both be a pathway into the engineering community and to equip students for success in both the classroom and the engineering profession. The course is built on a learner-centered platform that is intended to create an inclusive environment for first year students to successfully transition from high school to college. The course content covers human-centered design, systems thinking, professionalism and ethics. The intention of this approach is to provide a high-impact educational experience within the first year for engineering students so that they can engage in opportunities to become acclimated with the process of self-guided deep learning. Background The undergraduate, non-discipline specific ABET accredited engineering program is the sole engineering program at the James Madison University. The Department of Engineering (Madison Engineering MadE) was designed to develop engineering versatilists in line with the description provided from the Engineer of 2020 by the National Academy of Engineering: one who possesses strong analytical skills, strong communication skills, a strong sense of professionalism, creativity, and versatility. The curriculum combines a liberal arts general education core with courses in math, science, engineering design, engineering science, engineering management, systems analysis, and sustainability to instruct, train and guide the engineering versatilist. ENGR 101: Engineering First Year Student Seminar was the entry point into the program and the curriculum. The course was a one credit hour survey course that was offered in the fall semester where the whole first year cohort met once a week for fifty minutes. While there were multiple iterations of the course were offered between 2008 and 2011, the general intent of the course was to give an overview of the engineering curriculum and to contextualize the engineering profession. The course was last offered in the fall of the academic year of 2011-2012. Without the ENGR 101 course, students only have one engineering course in their first-year. Engineering Opportunities Course Overview This paper represents the redesign and relaunch of ENGR 101 as the Engineering Opportunities course with a focus on the structure and assessment of the course. P ge 26509.2 Learning Materials The course content focuses on: 1) Human Centered Design & Design Thinking a problem solving approach that enables students to tackle design challenges in teams. 2) Systems Thinking Helping students understand the world as interconnected systems. 3) Professionalism and Ethics Helping students understand the role of the engineer in our department and our profession. Learning Communities To facilitate the creation community, the class is divided into “families” of approximately ten to thirteen first year students per family. Each of these teams is led by a pair of peermentors (students in the Madison Engineering Leadership Program). Learning Activities Students are instructed to share and document their process, sources of inspiration, and prototypes through sending tweets to the class Twitter account. The use of Twitter helps us: 1) Create community within and across the department 2) Encourage students to think about their professional online persona 3) Monitor the activity of the class in real time when teams are working in different locations The following are a few of the learning project based activities and methods for assessing learning: group design challenges, presentations, reading quizzes, canvas discussion, and small group discussions. Teams complete place-based design challenges throughout the course. These include a: 1) 1st day design challenge of everyday objects 2) Local design challenge 3) International design competition using the online platform