2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is an evidence-based practice paper. Our university is in the process of a mandatory transition from a quarter based system to a semester based system. This involves completely transitioning our entire curriculum in a university wide effort, involving many different perspectives and opinions. In this paper, we aim to outline lessons learned from this challenging project, specifically from the perspective of the mechanical engineering program, but with applications to any major. We focus on how we approached the problem, the challenges and successes in working with other departments on our campus, and our methods of preserving the strengths of our current program, while also taking the opportunity to modernize our curriculum. Those strengths we aim to preserve include: a focus on hands-on, active learning, design experiences in each of the four years, and concentrations that allow students to develop and focus their particular interests. Struggles we have encountered include managing ever changing requirements, working across the college to standardize what we call service courses (courses that are taken by multiple majors), and managing the high unit load of our high number of lab courses. We have found success with a wide range of strategies, which we will describe in the paper. These have included a backwards design (starting with the outcomes for the students), having a small team focused on the details of the planning with frequent feedback from the department, and college wide meetings to compare work and share ideas.