2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Biomedical engineers (BME) apply engineering principles to solve problems in biology and medicine and have contributed to revolutionary and life-saving concepts, such as artificial organs, advanced prosthetics, and new pharmaceuticals. As their impact on healthcare and society is significant, how BMEs learn to approach a problem is critical. What role should a BME play in deciding how gene editing is used in humans? How can a BME ensure that a medical decision-making algorithm serves all demographics equally? Given that today’s societal challenges are growing more complex, a new kind of engineer is required. Future engineers must consider the ethical and societal implications of their work, develop and implement systems of greater and greater complexity, and be prepared to live and work as global citizens, working in diverse groups and diverse contexts. ABET’s new Engineering Learning Outcomes and new addition of ethics, inclusivity, and empathy creates a need to address these new areas in a BME curriculum, and each department must determine how this is done in their specific program and educational environment.

To ensure that undergraduate students graduate with the knowledge, tools, and experiences needed to meet these desired outcomes, and to ensure the curriculum meets the changing requirements and suggestions of accreditation bodies and professional societies, an effective continuous improvement process must be in place. A key process component often overlooked is the curriculum design process itself. An undergraduate BME program at a top R1 university, in close partnership with its teaching center, is currently undergoing an undergraduate curriculum design process as part of its continuous improvement cycle.

Under its curriculum design program, the teaching center facilitators have begun guiding department faculty through a collaborative curriculum design project. Five key design principles drive the project: 1) an emphasis on equitable experiences and outcomes for students, along with equitable participation in the design process by multiple stakeholders; 2) an emphasis on purposeful and intentional curriculum design decisions; 3) the implementation of a design process that is transparent to stakeholders and that results in a curriculum in which goals, requirements, and pathways are transparent; 4) a centering of student learning in all curricular decisions; and 5) an emphasis on alignment between our goals for student learning, curricular pathways, course objectives, teaching pedagogies, and assessment.

Using these key principles and evidence-based best practices, and taking advantage of the department’s collaborative culture around undergraduate education, BME and the teaching center carried out a step-by-step, stakeholder-informed, process used to formulate eight new curricular learning objectives for BME’s undergraduate program. Additionally, for each new objective, a Proficiencies Rubric was developed that reflects what student learning should look like across the curriculum for that objective at the Exposed, Familiar, and Depth levels. These Rubrics will be used to map our current courses with the new objectives and explore opportunities for course revisions or re-sequencing, and as part of a continued improvement process where incremental changes can be quantitatively tracked over time. This paper reviews that step-by-step process and overall timeline used to complete this phase of the curriculum design project. Future work will focus on implementation of the Rubrics, actions taken to adapt courses to our new objectives, and the assessment process developed to measure changes made over time.