2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Professional organizations are looking for engineers who are prepared to solve global challenges. Alongside their technical skills, these engineers need the communications and professional skills to work in diverse teams; further, collaborations across technical and non-technical professional roles are critical to the success of meeting these challenges. Often, however, students are assumed to have these non-technical skills, and they are not taught in engineering-focused courses. Recognizing this need, the authors of this paper embarked on a co-teaching model to (re)vise and (re)imagine how an engineering capstone course is taught at a large Midwest university.

One of the overarching goals of the multidisciplinary senior capstone course is to bring together students from a variety of engineering and non-engineering majors to work on industry-sponsored design projects. To be successful in meeting their project goals, students must learn to navigate their team’s different personalities and work styles to collaboratively move through the design process. While working in teams, students from these various academic, professional, and personal backgrounds use their experiences to transform from individuals working on a project to a cohesive team producing solutions that consider both the technical and non-technical impacts of their designs. The integration of non-engineering (e.g., liberal arts) students and pedagogy into the design process has resulted in an enriching experience for both students and project sponsors.

The course is further guided by the industry need for engineers who can smoothly transition into the professional environment with technical skills as and the professional skills (e.g., collaboration and communication) that support them. The senior design capstone course is the culmination of an undergraduate’s academic experience—an opportunity for students to draw on prior knowledge and apply that prior knowledge to new contexts. It is also an opportunity for educators to help hone those skills in preparation for the next stage of students' professional development as engineers.

This paper shares how the authors have found opportunities to meet these professional needs by adding a faculty member with a Ph.D. in English and background in writing pedagogy and technical communication as a member of the instructional team alongside the course’s existing engineering faculty. We will share the modifications made to the course, the rationale for those changes, and some of the preliminary data regarding student perception of the development of both their collaborative and technical communication skills throughout the two-semester course sequence. Our hope is to provide one model for the interdisciplinary future of engineering education.