2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In late 2019, the faculty of a Mechanical Engineering program at a large Midwestern University began a long-range initiative to redesign the undergraduate mechanical engineering 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.

While updating and renewing a mechanical engineering curriculum is not a novel concept, performing a complete redesign of the curriculum is a major undertaking and can be completed utilizing any of many tools and approaches. There are reports in the literature from similar recent efforts, each of which utilized specific methods and tools that were appropriate for their goals and objectives [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].

In this report, we describe the approach currently being utilized at The University, and report on the progress to date as well as on future plans. The approach used in this report began with an initial faculty workshop that was used to generate discussion and solicit input to better understand the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the current curriculum and explore faculty interests around curriculum redesign.

Following that initial workshop, a committee of department faculty working with a professional from the University Teaching Center began the process of evaluating and renewing the curriculum. The committee began by developing a document summarizing the program goals, student learning outcomes, and student proficiencies, which provide the basis for the revised curriculum. These were mapped to the ABET required student learning outcomes [8]. This information was shared with the larger faculty of the department and their feedback was integrated into the document.

While much work is still to be done on this project, the committee and larger faculty are continuing to utilize a structured design process based on Understanding by Design by Wiggins and Mc Tighe. The current focus of the work involves collaborating with the departmental interest groups to map the current curriculum content and evaluate it against the recently created program goals, student learning outcomes and proficiencies. Departmental interest groups are composed of faculty with expertise in each of the curricular content areas of mechanics, system dynamics and control, thermal sciences, and design and manufacturing. As part of this process faculty will complete additional training in the Backward Design process, and then perform the mapping exercise. The results of the mapping exercise will be used to determine core required components of the undergraduate curriculum as well as flexible elements of the curriculum that could be elective elements of study to develop areas of specialization.

Once identified, core content topics will be used to develop a set of required courses for the curriculum, with the goal of allowing a more flexible program of study that can accommodate students with varying career and industry focus. The overall learning experiences of the students will also be integrated into the process of building the curriculum to provide a range of activities, interactions and environments. Another process goal is to find opportunities to integrate topics across the curriculum, thereby reducing silo effects, as well as increasing learning efficiency and program flexibility.