Critical Thinking in the Workplace: A Course Design and Implementation

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONIn May 2010 Waterloo Engineering embarked on the development of a 2 nd generation online professional skills development program, WatPD-Engineering. Like its predecessor, PDEng, the program is composed of five online courses taken by Waterloo Engineering students while they are on work terms. These courses focus on providing background knowledge underpinning professional skills such as communication, project management, problem solving, conflict resolution, and teamwork and connect this background knowledge to the application of the skills in the workplace. Students take one course per work term until they have met the professional skills component of their degree requirements. Each course is expected to take a total time commitment of 20 to 30 hours over a 10 week period and students work on the courses outside of work hours.The WatPD-Engineering program consists of two core courses: PD 20 Engineering Workplace Skills 1 -Developing Reasoned Conclusions, and PD 21 Engineering Workplace Skills 2 -Developing Effective Plans, followed by three elective courses from the WatPD suite of elective courses: PD 3 Communication, PD 4 Teamwork, PD 5 Project Management, PD 6 Problem Solving, and PD 7 Conflict Resolution. While the WatPD elective courses have existed for three to four years and been offered to students from UWaterloo's nonengineering faculties, the two core courses, PD 20 and PD 21, had to be developed for the new program.In essence PD 20 is a course on critical thinking in the workplace. In particular the objective of the course is to help engineering students that are new to the professional workplace make objective observations on all aspects of their workplace activity, draw logical conclusions from their observations, and communicate their findings to both lay and technical audiences. This presentation describes the development of PD 20 from the initial vision formulation in May 2010 to its first offering in Winter 2011. COURSE DEVELOPMENT PHASESThe development process followed the traditional engineering design and development process. There was an initial request for proposals, a selection of an instructional development team, a preliminary course design review, a final course design review, design testing with a student focus group, quality assurance testing by students and staff, the final version release, and continuous learning outcome assessment. The initial request for proposals had a format very similar to that used in many engineering specification or requirement documents. Included in the request for proposals was a description of the intended course with suggested topics, a specification of the intended audience, a listing of both required and desirable course features, and a specification of the required expertise of the course content development team.Two proposals were submitted for consideration. After a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of both proposals, the proposal submitted by a course content development team from the Philosophy Department...

Critical thinking for engineers and engineering critical thinking

“…In particular the objective of the course is to help engineering students that are new to the professional workplace make objective observations on all aspects of their workplace activity, draw logical conclusions from their observations, and communicate their findings to both lay and technical audiences. [1] The course was solicited to replace an existing but intensely unpopular course developed "by committee," internal to the program. That course, plausibly, reflected the assumption already mentioned: that what everyone teaches counts as critical thinking.…”