Integrating Industry Experts into Engineering Education: Case Study

An advanced grade control course is described as a model for industry involvement in special topics educational offerings. Several unique aspects of these courses were the lack of textbooks on the topic, little previously developed course content, and the lack of faculty expertise in the subject area. In light of these challenges the course was successfully implemented by selecting industry experts and coordinating their efforts into a cohesive learning experience. The writers worked with representatives from McAninch Corporation, Ziegler Caterpillar, and other organizations to develop the courses at Iowa State University. Since the courses were the first known offerings of their kind, qualitative interviews were conducted to identify appropriate educational outcomes and objectives necessary to expedite the process of becoming an advanced grade control specialist. These outcomes and objectives can be applied to a variety of educational delivery systems and were helpful in determining suitable course material, topics, and structure.     

Enhancing Civil Engineering Education and ABET Criteria through Practical Experience

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) has adopted a revised set of criteria for accrediting engineering programs. Nevertheless, as in the past, civil engineering departments will be required to demonstrate proficiency in specific subject areas which are included in the ABET program criteria. This paper investigates how civil engineering students at Lamar University improved their understanding of various subject areas required by ABET and listed in the Program Criteria for Civil and Similarly Named Engineering Programs and the General Criteria (professional component) by being involved with cooperative, part-time, and summer work experiences. In particular, the findings suggest that both undergraduate and graduate students believe that three areas have been greatly enhanced with engineering work. They include structural engineering, project management/scheduling and estimating, and teamwork. In addition, undergraduates perceive that their understanding of health and safety issues and ethical considerations has also increased. In contrast, graduate students believe that their knowledge of hydraulics, hydrology, and water resources, constructability, and economic factors has been enhanced by civil engineering work experiences.     

Industrially Sponsored Senior Capstone Experience: Program Implementation and Assessment

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) 2000 requires that students participate in a major design experience prior to graduation. A well-planned senior design capstone program will satisfy this criterion while meeting the Criterion 3 (a–k) program outcomes. Seattle University has an industrially sponsored, year-long, senior design program that has been in existence for the past 20 years. In addition to applying the knowledge of mathematics, science, and engineering to solve a real-life engineering problem, students develop the soft skills such as project management, leadership, team work, written and oral communication, and professional networking which are important for a successful career. This paper describes the program within the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, lists the various tools used to assess the program outcomes, and includes assessment of the program by sponsoring agencies, alumni, and reflection by faculty.     

Educating Students via Distance Learning for Civil Engineering Design

Two structural engineering courses were taught using distance-learning technology. One course was a graduate level, steel design course and the other was an undergraduate, elective, timber design course. Two-way live video and audio connections linked classrooms at San Jose State University and San Francisco State University. The interaction between student and teacher is discussed. These courses were the first time the California State University system offered students academic credit at either of two universities for a course taught via distance education from a single location. The challenges of teaching engineering design concepts via distance learning are discussed. Assessment of the teaching method was performed using student surveys and review of student grades. The assessment survey revealed that the students’ overall impression was positive. Grades received by the students at the Remote Site were lower than those at the Home Site, but this discrepancy may not have been a result of the distance-learning environment.     

Training Faculty to Teach Civil Engineering

Adoption of ASCE’s Policy Statement 465 and subsequent discussion of the what, how, and who of teaching the body of knowledge (BOK) that will be required for professional civil engineering practice has heightened the need for continued improvement in civil engineering education. ASCE has explicitly said the role of educators and practitioners in teaching the body of knowledge is critical and has listed faculty-related success factors for teaching the BOK. A key success factor is statement 465’s call for faculty and practitioners to properly prepare to “effectively engage students in the learning process.” This paper considers this challenge and discusses an instructor training program that effectively prepares faculty and practitioners to actively engage students in the learning process as envisioned by Policy Statement 465. We will show quantifiable evidence of the positive results gained by using this instructor training program through student and instructor feedback. Additionally, alternative shorter courses based on this program of preparation are highlighted that may be attended by the faculty of multiple engineering programs and by practitioners.     

On the Job versus Graduate School Training of Forensic Engineers—An Instructor and Professional Engineer’s View

This paper provides insights from a graduate forensic engineering course for civil engineers and analyses its success from the instructor and student perspectives. The objective of the study was to evaluate teaching methods and settings for training of forensic engineers in light of new body of knowledge needs for the profession. The assessment methodology used student feedback before, during, and after the semester-long course and the instructor’s observations and prior forensic engineering consulting experience. The course was structured around student learning objectives that paralleled actual engineer training in professional consulting firms. The students used hands-on learning, field investigations, library-based research, and report writing. Focus was placed on learning basic research skills and applying scientific method which were at low levels among students. This is of concern to the profession as these skills, along with analytical ability, form part of the basic tool set of most engineers. By the end of the course, writing and review skills had improved significantly and student perceptions of the specialized skills turned more favorable. The students overwhelmingly appreciated inclusion of guest lectures by forensic engineers to demonstrate the relevance of this field. It was concluded that inadequate technical writing and reading skills, symptomatic of students in many engineering programs can be corrected through a forensic engineering course.     

Green Building and Sustainable Infrastructure: Sustainability Education for Civil Engineers

This paper discusses a framework for incorporating sustainable design/thinking as a new civil engineering course and experiences from the pilot offering. Important areas are outlined to aid all engineers in understanding sustainability in context with traditional engineering principles. Green-building rating systems were used to introduce the concepts of sustainability in buildings and infrastructure, highlighted by presentations from green-building professionals. By providing a better understanding of sustainability through education, civil engineers can provide proactive solutions to a growing global infrastructure.     

Practical Summer Training in Civil and Construction Engineering for Cultivation of Professional Ability

The cultivation of professional ability for undergraduate civil and construction engineering students is very important to help them meet the challenges that await them in the fast changing world. This paper presents a thorough study of practical training in the field of civil and construction engineering. Based upon an extensive literature review of the practical training curriculum worldwide, questionnaires were provided to contractors, educators and students in Taiwan to assess problems in traditional summer practical training courses for civil and construction engineering in Taiwan. At the outset of the study, it was thought that the lack of available jobs for students might be related solely to the economy but the findings indicated that the reasons were more complex ranging from concerns about liability for students working in construction sites to traditional cultural concerns about whether apprentices should be paid. The Delphi method was used to study the problems that were identified, relating to planning, execution, evaluation, and development of the existing practical training programs. A refined and improved summer practical training curriculum is proposed for civil and construction engineering education in Taiwan based upon the findings. Although the survey related to practical training programs for engineering students was conducted in Taiwan, the results might vary in other countries. The procedures used, and results obtained may be valuable resources and have a potential use for other countries. What is certain is that practical training can play an important role in readying engineering students for the work place in any location and making the practical training as effective and as safe as possible should be a universal goal.     

Survey of the National Civil Engineering Curriculum

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive survey of over 40% of the nation’s undergraduate civil engineering programs. This analysis is based on uniform data collected for accreditation and is principally concerned with three major groups of courses: (1) math and science, (2) general education, and (3) engineering topics. The analysis reveals what is currently being taught in our nation’s civil engineering undergraduate programs, what is not being taught, and the implications for future professional practice. The paper discusses how the average national curriculum has changed historically, how well the curriculum satisfies Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology criteria, and what the current distribution of courses and topics says about the priorities of civil engineering education. Overall, the curriculum was found to be highly specialized in terms of technical subjects but lacking in focus regarding the liberal arts, professional skills, and systems thinking.     

How to Stop Engineers from Becoming “Bush Lawyers”: The Art of Teaching Law to Engineering and Construction Students

Law forms a core part of most engineering and construction programs. The way that law subjects are taught varies dramatically, and too often focuses on trying to teach students complex aspects of the law, such as contract, tort, and trade practices. This paper suggests that the aim of including law subjects in construction and engineering degrees needs to be clearly understood as this determines the content of the law subject. It is argued that the reason for including a law subject should be not to teach students the law, but rather to train them to recognize when legal issues arise in their work, and how to respond to such issues. With this aim in mind, a model curriculum is proposed and insight given into how to most effectively implement such a course.     

Teaching Engineering Surveying in a Civil Engineering Program: Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment

As engineering surveying is highly concerned with its intensive involvement in the construction of roads and bridges, drainage systems, buildings, railways, and tunnels in civil engineering, the subject of engineering surveying is being offered by the Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics to all undergraduate students who are taking the Bachelor of Civil Engineering Degree Program in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Under the new outcome-based curriculum and work-integrated education requirements, the curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment for the subject are described here by answering the questions of “what are the goals and objectives of the curriculum,” “what should students learn,” and “how should it be learned, taught, and assessed.”     

Information Technology in Civil Engineering Curriculum

The fast-moving world of information technology confronts the civil engineer with constant change. This creates challenges for educators and students because rapid change requires curricula to be flexible and educators to gain competency and access to new equipment and software. Whereas a decade ago, civil engineering educators debated how to teach “programming,” the picture is now much more complex. The paper reports on how information technologies are changing the practice of civil engineering and offers a new framework for integrating next-generation information technology into the civil engineering curriculum at the department level.     

Model of Integrating Humanitarian Development into Engineering Education

Entering the first half of the 21st century, the engineering profession must embrace a new mission statement—to contribute to the building of a more sustainable, stable, and equitable world. In particular, the engineering profession needs to train a new generation of engineers who can better meet the challenges of the developing world and address the needs of the most destitute people on our planet. This paper presents a model of integrating humanitarian development into engineering education based on our experience with Engineers Without Borders-U.S.A. and the development of the Engineering for Developing Communities program at the University of Colorado at Boulder over the past eight years. We also review some like-minded programs in U.S. universities and discuss how such programs can be integrated into engineering education.     

Integrating Management Breadth in Civil Engineering Education

At the beginning of the 21st century, there is a wider awareness that the civil engineering industry has become a global industry. The rapid increase in foreign ownership of firms in the United States along with the globalization of economic markets is reminding professionals that they must be aware of global events before they impact local operating conditions. In response to these developments, university programs must begin to broaden their focus to include subjects that address new economy realities. Specifically, the time to begin exposing students to management topics such as entrepreneurship, financial management, and global economics has arrived. If the civil engineering industry is going to evolve into a new economy business, it will require individuals who are as comfortable with the financial and technological components of the business as they are with design or construction fundamentals.     

Course in Professional Practice Issues

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and practitioners recognize professional practice issues as important in undergraduate civil engineering education. This paper describes a creative approach for incorporating professional practice issues into the civil engineering curriculum through a course entitled “Civil Engineering Practice.” This course has the following advantages: (1) It encourages active learning via activities as opposed to a traditional seminar; (2) forms long-term teaching partnerships with engineering professionals; (3) offers a venue where important yet distinct topics can be presented systematically; (4) provides the local engineering community with the opportunity to share its accomplishments and to further continuing education credits; (5) reinforces the professional practice elements of the capstone design project; and (6) supplies structured time where students can interact with potential employers and vice-versa. The course feedback from students, faculty, engineering professionals, and ABET evaluators has been overwhelmingly positive.     

Introducing Smart Structures Technology into Civil Engineering Curriculum: Education Development at Lehigh University

Most of today’s civil engineering students are unaware of the potential use of smart structures technology in the design, construction, and maintenance of civil infrastructure systems. This paper presents recent education development in the area of smart structures technology at Lehigh University. The goal of this education development is to prepare the future engineer of society for this cutting-edge technology, for which they may see broad application in their professional practice. An overview of the smart structures technology in civil engineering applications, from a systems perspective, is first given in the paper. Educational activities incorporating smart structures technology into civil engineering curriculum are next presented in this paper.     

Approach for Integrating Professional Practice Issues into Undergraduate Environmental Engineering Design Projects

According to C. L. Dym and P. Little, the complete design process includes identifying a need or problem, recognizing constraints, identifying and developing courses of action, testing potential courses of action, selecting optimum courses of action, preparing the documents required for the design, managing the overall process, communicating the design, construction, and testing. We have addressed these design considerations by linking design projects in our introductory physicochemical treatment processes course (EV401, taken by second-semester juniors) and our senior capstone design course (EV490, taken by second-semester seniors). The process developed and implemented addresses the integration of professional practice into design inexperience. We require our cadet students to communicate with their customers, an illustrator, and tradesmen, three forms of communication that are necessarily quite different from traditional student-professor exchanges. Also, students must design under constraints, this time not because of the closed nature of the project but rather because of “real world” resource constraints: time to complete the project, a limited budget to purchase materials and labor, availability of materials, ease of construction, and balancing competing projects (in other courses). The first attempt at implementing this engineering design learning model occurred during the spring of 2001 in EV401. Herein we assess the design and construction of one of two projects, oriented toward modification of a surface-water treatment plant model. Results suggest that iterative growth can occur and a more complete appreciation of the design process can result.     

Effectiveness of Scenarios and the Socratic Method in Teaching Law to Construction Students

Is the use of scenarios combined with the Socratic method an effective method to teach legal subjects to nonlaw students on a building and construction program? The scenarios are intended to (1) enable students to understand the legal theories through the practical application of those theories to problems posed in a scenario and (2) stimulate reasoning, analysis, and critical thinking through the Socratic method among students accustomed to memorizing handouts of PowerPoint slides. Both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered and analyzed to determine the effectiveness of using scenarios and the Socratic method in a required, first-year, entry-level, law module. Preliminary data of this ongoing research appears to indicate that the former goal (of providing a practical application and understanding of theories) was generally achieved while the latter goal (of promoting analysis and critical thinking skills among the students) was achieved to a lesser degree. As a subgroup of the subject, students will be repeating the module, a rare opportunity presents itself to delve into this question in more detail in the future.     

Crisis of Civil Engineering Education in Information Technology Age: Analysis and Prospects

The brightest students entering postsecondary education are often attracted by routes other than engineering that are perceived more likely to yield careers of higher prestige and greater returns. For civil engineering in particular, this is further compounded by the fact that the field is not traditionally viewed as a high-tech discipline. Thus, student quality, enrollment, and research funding in civil engineering programs have been declining across North America. The conservative construction industry is part of the problem; adjustments of this aging cartel to the new economy are still at the embryonic level. Civil engineering educators are facing the question, How do we change the “hard hat down in the ditch” image of civil engineering in the minds of the new information technology generation? This paper presents an analysis of possible causes of this problem and a vision for potential future solutions.     

Student Assessment of a Problem-Based Learning Experiment in Civil Engineering Education

This paper describes an experiment with problem-based learning (PBL), an instructional methodology used in response to the challenges posed by today’s professional education. Contrary to the conventional model that places an application problem after concepts or topics have been introduced, PBL uses the problem to initiate learning. Besides promoting the construction of knowledge, it may also contribute to the development of some skills and attitudes deemed important for engineers’ professional practice. This research, of a qualitative nature, intended to investigate how students evaluate this methodology and its potential to attain the educational goals set for the course. In order to answer the research question, the methodology was implemented in the civil engineering curriculum of a Brazilian public university. The results herein presented, deriving mainly from classroom observations and an end-of-course questionnaire, show that most of the students evaluate the methodology positively. Even considering the short duration of the course and its small number of credits, it may also have promoted the development of some skills and attitudes besides knowledge acquisition.