2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Technical communication courses are part of the core curriculum for many civil and environmental engineering programs, and scaling of these courses is both necessary and challenging. Technical communications courses focused on writing and speaking require a significant grading effort. Students entering these courses have widely varied knowledge bases, often are not confident in their writing abilities, and typically have negative opinions towards the need for professional communication skills. Personalized feedback for writing assignments is essential in the development of the student writers, but the open-ended nature of the assignments and the many variations of “correctness” in the written products compounds the grading process. Programs experiencing undergraduate population growth may recognize technical communications courses as less “scalable” than computational-based courses. The amount of effort to grade additional papers and presentations is noticeably greater than the additional capacity needed to grade engineering analysis and design styles of homework. At the University of Tennessee, the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering is restructuring their technical communications course to address current and future “scaling” concerns. The proposed method for course modifications adopts the ASCE ExCEEd Teaching Model strategies for new course design, recommends a team-teaching approach, and promotes traits comparable to a flipped classroom structure.