Sense of achievement: Initial evaluation of an Integrated Engineering design cornerstone module

Abstract

Pressure from industry, professional bodies and students for a reform to the curriculum and delivery style of engineering education in the United Kingdom has been mounting for a number of years. Although there have been many excellent individual initiatives, developments that span a whole school or faculty, those encompassing a number of disciplines and departments are rare. This paper describes the curriculum development and evaluation of a year 1 module for the new Integrated Engineering Programme, which spans across the UCL faculty of engineering sciences in the UK. It describes the motivation for change, some of the approaches adopted and the achievements documented by the students.

Curriculum nativeness – measures and impacts on the performance of engineering students

“…Notable are cases where whole curricula are subject of integrative measures. One such example is the reformations of undergraduate engineering programs at UCL (Mitchell et al 2019;Tilley and Mitchell 2015) based on the premise that 'the modern engineer should understand the context of the problems they address, appreciating the ethical, societal and financial connotations of their design decisions' (Bains et al 2015). Moreover, since the founding in 1997 the Olin Collage of Engineering has gained much attention for its organisation and curriculums development processes.…”

Gender differences in first-year students’ expectations towards a new engineering multidisciplinary curriculum

“…A short on-line survey was completed via Moodle by the newly enrolled year 1 students, across all engineering departments, at the beginning of their first term at UCL, in September 2014 (pre-degree survey). The main aim of this survey was to understand the initial perceptions and expectations of the students upon entering their engineering education at UCL [9].…”