Document Type

Article

Publication Date

June 2016

Publication Title

ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

DOI

10.18260/p.25423

ISSN

2153-5965

Disciplines

Curriculum and Instruction | Engineering Education

Abstract

Over the past few years, San Jose State University (SJSU) has mandated that all of the undergraduate degree programs including engineering degrees be set at 120 units. With the existing number of units for the BS engineering degrees, this mandatory requirement has led to new innovations in General Education (GE) at SJSU. We have created a two-course sequence to support the integration of upper division General Education into the engineering major. Advanced GE at SJSU is designed to help students become integrated thinkers who can see connections between and among a variety of concepts and ideas. In the College of Engineering at SJSU, we believe that it is critical that engineering students integrate the GE student learning outcomes into their engineering studies. In these two courses, students are challenged to understand the relationship of engineering to the broader community both in the U.S. and worldwide. In addition to the assignments in this course, the engineering faculty have created linked activities in the senior project courses that allow the students to apply these concepts to your engineering disciplines. The engineering senior level general education classes take a case study approach. Each case study module will have specific deliverables including written materials and resource links, a set of discussion questions, and a set of written assignments. In addition, the themes addressed (and the discussion questions) for each module would then provide guidance for the students in writing their end of semester “application papers” where they consider the issues inherent in their own senior design project. This presentation will describe the implementation of this hybrid GE/senior project course and will present the assessment of the first year of this program’s implementation.

Comments

© 2016 American Society for Engineering Education. This article originally appeared in the proceedings of the 2016 ASEE Annual Conference, and can also be found online at this link.
Paper presented at 2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, Louisiana.

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