2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Support systems for students, including opportunities for direct interactions with instructors and access to campus resources, are important contributors to student success in engineering courses. Additionally, policies regarding student expectations and behavior in the context of engineering courses allow instructors to communicate both transparency and empathy to students, creating opportunities to directly impact student success. The switch to remote learning practices during a global disruption presented an opportunity for instructors to reevaluate the ways in which they interacted with students, provided access to learning supports and personal resources, and communicated the expected behaviors of students within engineering courses. These practices are often documented within course syllabi, which have traditionally been used to communicate classroom policies between instructors and students. The purpose of this study was to examine changes in the available support systems for engineering students and instructor communication of course policies using course syllabi across nine semesters. Findings can help inform instructional decision making of new engineering educators. A previously established Course Change Typology was utilized to deductively code course syllabi from one engineering department at a midwestern R1 university. A total of 218 syllabi were coded, encompassing core engineering courses from Spring 2019 to Spring 2023 with 53 unique instructors represented. A subset of codes from the Course Change Typology that related to student support and instructor communication were presented in the results. Results were presented based on the percentage of courses displaying evidence of each code level. The findings indicated that the presence of opportunities for instructional support increased from 95% of courses to 100% of courses over the observed period from Spring 2019 to Spring 2023. Instructor communication relative to student personal support resources increased from being present in 33% of courses to being present in 65% of courses from Spring 2019 to Spring 2023. On average, penalties were consistently more present across all semesters (~2 per syllabus) than leniencies (~1 per syllabus), and neither dimension experienced significant changes over time. From Spring 2019 to Fall 2021, 43% of syllabi on average included discussions of academic dishonesty policies, experiencing a notable increase to an average of 76% presence in syllabi for all semesters following Fall 2021. While opportunities for instructional support and communication of personal support resources increased during and after the disruption (Spring 2020 – Spring 2023), there is still room for improvement in how instructors provide support and communicate resources in syllabi. The implications of these findings and recommendations for new engineering instructors based on results are detailed in the paper.