2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: Mechanical Engineering Curriculum Renewal Process at a Large University

In late 2019, the Mechanical Engineering department at X University began a long-range initiative to redesign the undergraduate ME curriculum. The aim was to develop a new set of goals for the program independent from the current curriculum, with a focus on meeting the needs and challenges of modern students as they enter a constantly changing professional environment.

Following the best practices in instructional design and working with a professional from the University Teaching Center, the committee has employed the Backward Design Process (Understanding by Design, Wiggins and McTighe, 2005) to ensure that the focus was on student learning outcomes and proficiencies, rather than specific course content.
To begin the curriculum redesign process, a retreat was held in December of 2019 to gather input from faculty and staff of the department, with a focus on the question “what do we want our students to be able to do, know, and care about after successfully completing the ME program?” The output of this retreat was six guiding “areas” that would guide a department committee in (eventually) redesigning the curriculum: Problem Solving; Communication; Professional Identity and Ethics; Teamwork, Leadership, and Inclusivity; Information Literacy, Judgement, and Critical Thinking; Character Traits and Self-Directed Learning.

As all readers will know, the Covid-19 pandemic ground many workplace plans and initiatives to a screeching halt. This curriculum renewal initiative of the mechanical engineering program at X University was no exception. Over the course of 2020-2022, slow progress was made on writing specific program goals to match each of the six guiding areas developed during the 2019 retreat. Next, progress was made on developing the student learning outcomes that would comprise each program goal. Starting in 2022, the curriculum committee was finally able to move the project off the back burner and work with more focus and purpose to flesh out the student proficiencies, which are the fine-grained skills that make up student learning objectives.

At present, the committee has developed the program goals, student learning objectives, and student proficiencies. These have been mapped to the ABET required student learning outcomes. This information has beenshared with the larger faculty of the department and feedback is being collected.

Much work is still to be done on this project. The committee plans to complete the following work by April 2024:

• Continuing to solicit feedback from faculty, the department external advisory board, current undergraduate students in the program, recent graduates of the program, and representative industry professionals who frequently hire entry-level mechanical engineers.
• Determining which mechanical engineering topics should be core parts of the curriculum, and which topics might be more marginal. This will be determined by input from a variety of sources including: benchmarking of peer institutions, consulting with the core competencies represented on the FE exam, and by consulting with our department’s faculty interest groups (e.g., sub-groups of the faculty who share similar disciplinary interest and expertise)
• Working with faculty interest groups to train all faculty members on the Backward Design Process, so that all faculty will be able to focus on curricular redesign without focusing on a given topic, class, or subject area.

Future work that the committee plans to embark on in fall of 2024 includes using the developed program goals, student learning objectives, and student proficiencies to develop the specific courses that will make up the new curriculum.