Implementing A Common First Year Engineering Program At Michigan Tech

In the fall of 2000, Michigan Tech made a calendar conversion from quarters to semesters and, in conjunction with this, simultaneously overhauled the engineering curricula. One of the changes that we adopted was the development of a common first year engineering program. Prior to the calendar conversion, each academic department in the College of Engineering established its own curriculum for the entire four-year degree program. During the course of the curricular revamping, we also received funding from the NSF under the Action Agenda program with a portion of the grant dedicated to the implementation of the common first year engineering program. In designing our first year program, we “borrowed” ideas from several engineering schools, primarily those universities involved in the various NSF coalitions. This paper describes the procedure we followed to implement this sweeping curricular change and highlights the features that we incorporated into our first-year engineering program. Preliminary feedback and assessment from the first-year program as well as “lessons learned” will also be presented in the paper. The Timeline and Procedure for Change Step 1: Establishing the Leadership. In December of 1996, a new Dean of Engineering was hired at Michigan Tech. Soon after arriving on campus, he met with one of the authors (Sorby) to discuss his desire to develop a common first-year engineering program. Shortly thereafter, the decision was made to convert from quarters to semesters at Michigan Tech. The initiative to change the academic calendar to semesters was faculty driven, based primarily on educational objectives, and was not imposed by the administration or state government. In our quarter calendar, the winter term was disjointed with several breaks during its 10-week duration. The sentiment among the faculty was that this disjointed calendar along with the fast pace of 10-week quarters in the fall and spring did not allow students enough time for reflection on the material they were learning. There was a commitment on the part of the faculty and administration in the College of Engineering (COE) to look critically at existing programs and develop new, innovative curricula rather than “cut and paste” our quarter courses to fit the new academic calendar. In the coming months, the dean appointed Sorby to be the Director of General Engineering, charged with developing and implementing a common first-year engineering program at Michigan Tech. At about the same P ge 655.1 Proceedings of the 2001 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and Exposition Copyright © 2001, American Society for Engineering Education time, a new Associate Dean of Engineering for Academic Programs was named (Dr. Mark Plichta) and charged with leading the curriculum reform efforts in the college through the conversion to semesters. Step 2: Testing the Waters. In the fall of 1997, at the annual engineering chairs retreat, a common first-year program was discussed and endorsed by the chairs with the understanding that this change would be implemented in the fall of 2000 with the conversion to semesters. Chairs supported this program for two primary reasons: 1) students would have a degree of flexibility in switching from one major without loss of credits or time, and 2) students would get a “taste” of engineering in their first year at Michigan Tech. Further discussions throughout the 1997-98 academic year focused on the content of the program. During the spring term of 1998, meetings between Sorby, the deans, and the curriculum committees of each department in the college were conducted to gather input regarding the desired characteristics of the first-year engineering program. At about this same time, Plichta and Sorby teamed to write a successful grant proposal under the NSF Action Agenda program with a portion of the grant dedicated to the implementation of the first year engineering program. Step 3: Developing the Plan. During the summer of 1998 a committee was formed, chaired by Sorby, to develop the implementation plan for the first-year engineering program and volunteers from the various departments were sought. The planning committee sent a survey to all engineering faculty where they were presented with a list of 15 potential topics for inclusion in the first year engineering courses and were given 50 points to “spend” on them. In this way, they could assign more points in the categories that they deemed were important and fewer points in categories that they deemed unimportant. About 34% of the surveys were returned with the responses compiled and presented in Table 1. Table 1: Survey Results of Topical Content for First Year Courses