2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Empowering Engineers: Enhancing Communication Skills through a Technical Communication Lab

Presented at Multidisciplinary Engineering Division (MULTI) Technical Session 3

Communication labs and writing centers at universities support ABET-accredited engineering programs’ mandate to train students “to communicate effectively with a range of audiences” [1]. In this paper, we describe efforts to establish and analyze a new technical communication lab within the engineering school at Johns Hopkins University. In its first three semesters in operation, consultants at the Technical Communication Lab (TCL) completed over 1,000 sessions for 294 students. On a post-session survey, almost all students rated their session excellent, stated they would return to the TCL, and affirmed they would recommend the center to others.

However, the Technical Communication Lab still faces some challenges in terms of advertising, logistics, and breadth of services. To alleviate these concerns, the TCL will partner with faculty in different departments, investigate other scheduling software, publish student-facing resources on its website, gather support resources and additional training for its consultants, and offer several workshops each semester for the engineering school. We hope other institutions can apply our “lessons learned” when developing their own centers and resources to improve their engineering students’ communication skills in multiple disciplines.

Authors

Amanda Dawn Hilliard The Johns Hopkins University [biography]

Amanda Hilliard received her MA in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language and PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham in the UK. She has taught writing and communication courses abroad in South Korea, Vietnam, and Ecuador, and in the U.S. in Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and Maryland. She currently teaches in the Center for Leadership Education at the Johns Hopkins University.
Ryan Hearty http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5046-0617 The Johns Hopkins University [biography]

Ryan Hearty teaches in the Center for Leadership Education within Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and his PhD in history of science from Johns Hopkins University. As an engineer at JHU's Applied Physics Laboratory, Hearty built radio communications hardware for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. As an historian, he has studied collaborations across disciplines of engineering and applied science since the 1930s. His doctoral dissertation analyzed the rise and development of water quality management, a multidisciplinary field of applied science, from the New Deal to the Clean Water Act.

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