2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering as a professional practice increasingly unfolds within multicultural, digitally mediated, and globally distributed environments. Although communication is formally recognized within accreditation frameworks, engineering curricula often emphasize technical transmission more than culturally situated meaning-making. This paper presents a design-based, practitioner-oriented curricular effort to develop and pilot a scalable faculty-driven program that integrates global communication competencies into undergraduate engineering education. Three guiding questions shaped this work: (1) What global communication competencies do engineering educators identify as important for early-career engineers operating in international contexts? (2) How can a structured faculty-development and proposal-review process generate instructional modules that are theoretically grounded, instructionally useful, and responsive to identified needs? and (3) What early evidence supports faculty adoption and student engagement following pilot implementation?

The data sources utilized included an initial faculty needs assessment and resource-development survey, module proposal submissions, rubric-based module evaluation, faculty workshop assessments, and student pilot surveys. Quantitative data were analyzed descriptively, with selected correlational analyses examining relationships among perceived usefulness, relevance, adoption intent, and student confidence. Open-ended responses were reviewed thematically to identify recurring patterns in faculty priorities and student reflections. Findings indicate strong alignment between faculty-identified competencies and selected modules, high adoption intent among workshop participants, and statistically significant associations between perceived relevance and students’ confidence in their communication. While findings primarily reflect short-term, perception-based outcomes supplemented by structured reflection assessment, results suggest that intentionally designed global communication modules can support student awareness and professional identity development in international engineering contexts. The paper contributes a replicable curricular development model grounded in intercultural, situated, and experiential learning theory and offers practical guidance for advancing global competency in engineering education.