Innovative Practices for Engineering Professional Development Courses

Many universities require engineering majors to take some form of a professional development course. Generally, the goal of these courses is to prepare students for the engineering profession. Another important aspect of these courses is to provide a mechanism to satisfy accreditation criteria on student outcomes that are difficult to implement in other technical courses. At the University of Oklahoma, most engineering disciplines take the course titled: ENGR 2002 Professional Development. Historically, this course was effective in satisfying accreditation requirements on student outcomes, but was not well received by the students. Details of the reasons for this dissatisfaction and changes made in the re-design of this course are discussed in this paper. The new version of ENGR 2002 includes many innovative practices in team-based learning and peer learning that are shared in this paper. All of the vital elements of the four projects included in the course are provided to support others who would like to implement similar projects. Course surveys, completed by 148 students, were used as the primary assessment method. Additionally, standard course evaluations were used to compare this course to other engineering courses and show improvement from the previous version of ENGR 2002. Many student comments are included in the paper to show their reaction to different aspects of the course. One student made a comment that echoed our sentiments regarding the teaching of this course for the first time in the fall 2012 semester: "from being in this class it is noticeable that people need to take it to work on public speaking skills or working with groups." From our experience, many students grow a great deal in terms of communication effectiveness and ability to function on a multi-disciplinary team as a result of this course, and we believe these skills are essential to become a great engineer.