2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

All engineering students in Canada must take an Engineering Economics course as part of program accreditation requirements. These courses mainly focus on the evaluation of monetary profits and direct financial costs incurred during the design, operation and decommissioning phases of projects. Instructors commonly use textbooks as the primary tool to guide the students through the content of this course, which tend cost around $100 US each student. Like many courses, the materials in this course does not change much over time resulting in many students opting to not buy the required textbook and instead rely on free sources of information found online, in older editions of textbooks or simply rely on course notes. The patchwork of sources creates problems in this course in particular, because of the variation of notation used across sources, which can easily cause confusion. It was this problem that inspired the creation of a set of open-source materials that students and instructors can use for free, enabling the instructor to have control over notation and concepts to focus on while saving the students money. This paper discusses the lessons learned during the creation of these materials, and in first-time use of these materials in a class of 200 fourth-year undergraduate civil engineering students, as well as dissemination challenges after the project ended.