2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Within structural engineering education, teaching fundamental behavior and theory has always been paramount to academic educators. This thinking has resonated across both analysis and design courses, where the intent is to instill core fundamentals and the basis behind design standard provisions before students apply them to contexts that are more practical. While learning does not end with graduation, a question frequently asked is: “should educators teach more software in their classes?” Arguments against software in courses include: software diminishes learning the fundamentals, students should first learn techniques by hand, we should not teach students to be “black box” thinkers, or even that there is no room in the curriculum for these opportunities. Arguments supporting software in the classroom include: educators can demonstrate concepts at a deeper level, permits more contextualized scenarios, and leverage software to showcase fundamental behavior.

This body of work provides perspective insights (from educators and industry professionals) regarding what topics are taught or should be taught. By knowing what educators currently do or don’t do and why, we can benchmark the status quo. At the same time, knowing what industry values regarding modeling vs fundamental skills provides an opportunity to update their teaching practices. Having this benchmark, educators can tie practices to the ASCE BoK and the NCSEA recommended curriculum guidelines. Presented in this paper is the resulting survey data that begin to answer these research questions in the form of curricula change recommendations: “To what extent do industry vs. academic perspectives align or diverge regarding software education?” And “Where and to what extent could software be taught in structural classes and how can we leverage it?”

From the data, there was clear cohort agreement that fundamentals should not be abandoned and that not all analysis methods need to be taught. Software should be taught but how varied and for what intent. Professionals put more emphasis on integrating software throughout the curriculum for regular repeated exposure while faculty supported focused application to projects and capstones. Additionally, professionals advocated for more time building structural intuition around results and teaching techniques for software validation. Recommendations are provided to promote and push for software integration that balances these skills by rethinking analysis and design course delivery.