2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper details the first stages of a pilot project to generate meaningful student experiences within the general education experiences of students at a maritime-focused institution. The primary goal of this effort is to create engineers who are trained to see their non-major courses as both meaningful and impactful for their careers while learning how to mentor others. This will be accomplished by collaboratively developing a series of courses offered outside of the engineering departments to look at engineering issues from a non-technical perspective. This paper focuses on the first series of courses: sustainability – both as an environmental principle and as a philosophy for social responsibility.

This course sequence will be developed in part by utilizing strategies from the Engineering for One Planet initiative to discuss how all engineers can bring sustainable principles into their work, such as how engineering decisions and actions can unintentionally or disproportionately cause negative environmental consequences for communities that have historically been marginalized or negatively impacted. However, instead of solely attempting to address this from an engineering perspective, this work leans on the campus experts in these difficult conversations: the LAS faculty. Students can be presented with the technical aspects of a problem like coastal run-off or environmental regulations by an engineer and then be guided through the history and implications by a historian or philosopher. This has the potential to improve the student’s understanding of the material and limit the drain on instructors working outside their areas of expertise.

Like at many other institutions, the students at often feel their general education courses serve no purpose for them. This was especially true at because, until recently, our general education program required four specific courses that followed the traditional western hemisphere focus and included no electives. Colloquially, the students referred to them as “History of Dead White Guys 1 and 2” and “Literature of Dead White Guys 1 and 2”. A change by the college’s accrediting-body upended this system and allowed the campus to diversify its offerings. This was seen as an opportunity to develop courses that could appeal to the students’ interests and equip them to be better engineers at the same time. The other departments were extremely receptive to these proposals as, among other benefits, it potentially means students in their classes would be more engaged with the material.

Like any new programmatic offering, this will take significant time to fully implement. The first cohort in the microcredential would start in AY 2024-25 and would finish a final capstone in for AY 2026-27. The results of initial interest, enrollment, and student surveys will be presented in this paper to measure the potential to develop and expand this effort. Discussions on future work to generate a maritime-focused microcredential with courses such as “Literature of the Sea” and “Sea Shanties and Work Songs” will also be addressed.