The introduction to engineering course: A case study from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

Highlights

• The introductory course successfully motivated first year engineering students.

• The course improved student understanding on engineering profession.

• The CPBL increased students’ understanding to solve engineering problems.

• Effective CPBL environment can invigorate important skills among students.

Abstract

As part of an effort to enhance students' first year experience, all Chemical Engineering students in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia are required to take the Introduction to Engineering course. This course is designed to stimulate students’ passion and strengthen motivation for further engineering studies, as well as to enhance their technical knowledge and relevant professional skills. To investigate the impact of the course on students’ knowledge of engineering, an exploratory study is conducted through an open-ended survey, given at the beginning and end of the semester. The analysis shows that the ITE course successfully served the purpose of raising awareness about engineering profession among students, while motivating them through student-centred learning approaches. A qualitative study is also conducted by analysing reflection journals submitted by students to identify the improvement on professional skills that students have developed as they go through the course. This study concludes to show that first year engineering students who have gone through the activities in the course have understood the role of engineers and their job functions. They have also managed to develop professional skills as part of their initial journey to become good engineers.

Introduction

The requirements to face the challenges of the 21^st century necessitate chemical engineering graduates to be technically competent, and well equipped with professional skills and strength of character. A report from the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2007 highlights the need for higher educational institutions to offer courses that equip engineering students with knowledge and professional skills to effectively work in a constantly evolving industry (The Royal Academy of Engineering, 2007). The World Economic Forum report on the Future of Jobs published in 2016 highlights the top 10 skills needed for graduates, with complex problem solving, critical thinking and creativity being the most important skills (World Economic Forum, 2016).

Nevertheless, developing future chemical engineers who are fit for these challenges requires students who are motivated and willing to undergo rigorous education and training. In UTM, many students are enrolled into the chemical engineering program without really understanding ‘what is engineering’, and its importance. Basically, the students are from various socioeconomic status and background, with limited understanding and experience of their potential contributions to society as engineers and wider impact of their professional decisions. They do not realise the extent of the complexity of the content and the efforts required to develop the needed skills and attitude to be good engineers. Without the proper understanding of engineering, the context of its applications and their future roles, students do not have the motivation to put in the required effort. Thus, it is not surprising that some students drop out of engineering programs (Becker, 2010), even whilst in their first year (Tamara et al., 2005).

For this reason, the first year in engineering has always been seen as crucial in providing support on an overall view of engineering so that students will be better equipped and have a better idea of what is to come, as well as the potential that they have ahead of them if they were to continue on as engineers. Many institutions have developed introductory courses to help first-year engineering students to think and function as engineers, and to help them gain a better understanding of what it means to be an engineer. These introductory engineering courses vary in content and do not apply the same design and learning approach. Various model in implementing the introductory courses in the first year, leading to different outcomes of students’ development. Questions arise whether one should provide an overview of the fundamentals first, or help to inspire first year students on the vast possibilities and potentials of engineers so that they become motivated (Baillie, 1998). Many of the introductory engineering courses aimed to motivate, engage and retain students in engineering through various teaching and learning approaches. Various approaches exist in stimulating and motivating students’ interest in engineering, such as using hands-on design projects to provide realistic engineering experiences (Gustafsson et al., 2002; Gu et al., 2006). While there are institutions that focused on specific introductory engineering fields, which made it easier to focus on projects relevant to the area (Esparragoza et al., 2013), there are also institutions that offer a general introductory engineering course (Aloul et al., 2015; Nesbit et al., 2005).

A particularly interesting design-based approach is the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) approach. Gustafsson et al. (2002) presented a study of four first-year engineering introductory courses, from different universities that collaborative participate in the CDIO Program (Gustafsson et al., 2002). The program aimed to provide students with an education that emphasize fundamental engineering knowledge and to sustain productivity, innovation and excellence. The program prescribes improvements in increasing hands-on learning, emphasizing problem formulation, increasing active, experiential and group learning, as well as enhancing feedback mechanisms. Similarly, the College of Engineering at Shantou University has adopt the CDIO Initiative and redevelop new curricula for all five engineering programmes based on the CDIO framework (Gu et al., 2006). The introductory engineering courses that utilized a design-based approach reported increased motivation and retention among students.

Other than design-based approaches, there are also introductory engineering courses that utilized open-ended problems and authentic real-world tasks. Esparragoza et al. (2013) described a first-year course in the mechanical engineering curriculum at Technical University Federico Santa Maria (Esparragoza et al., 2013). This introductory course aims to stimulate students’ interest and strengthen their motivation for mechanical engineering through open-ended problems and authentic real-world tasks, individually and in teams. Aloul et al. describes a common first-year undergraduate engineering course for various engineering disciplines to freshmen in the College of Engineering at the American University of Sharjah (Aloul et al., 2015). This course was aimed at developing an understanding of the major roles of engineers, encouraging collaboration among engineering disciplines, building a foundation in problem solving and instituting ethical responsibilities in students. This course also allowed students to get to know the different engineering disciplines so that they could make an informed choice on which specific engineering area they would major on after their first year.

At Lafayette College, the Engineering Division has developed an innovative first-year engineering course, which introduces the engineering method and design approach (Nesbit et al., 2005). The course goals are to improve student motivation and retention, stimulate interest in and build bridges to mathematics, sciences, and the humanities courses, and to teach the first-year engineering students about engineering and how an engineer solves problems. This introductory course was important for first year engineering student because they can help to shape the imagination about what the engineering profession really is, how to think and function as an engineer, so they can act like engineers. As a result, this course lead to increased students’ satisfaction, a greater sense of community, and higher program retention rates.

In Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), the "Introduction to Engineering" (ITE) course has been in the curriculum of the chemical engineering program since its introduction in the first semester of the 2005/06 academic year. Designed based on the How People Learn (HPL) framework (Bransford et al., 2004) and Constructive Alignment (Biggs and Tang, 2007), the course aims to support students to bridge the gap between learning in a school environment and learning to be an engineer in the university. The ITE course provides supportive student-centred learning environments that allow students to develop important skills to learn, as well as understand and develop abilities required to be good engineers when they graduate. The course also aims to help students understand what engineering actually is, in everyday and professional contexts, and the need for good engineers, especially in facing up to the challenges of the 21 st Century. The ITE course has integrated various student-centered learning approaches, such as active learning, cooperative learning and problem-based learning to improve student understanding on the content, as well as to enhance professional skills development.

While there are similarities in the aim of the UTM Chemical Engineering ITE course with other introductory engineering courses described earlier, especially in helping students to understand engineering, one of the aims of the ITE course to bridge the gap between learning in school and learning to be an engineer is not common among other introductory engineering courses. This aim to bridge the gap means that the ITE course is designed with many scaffolding activities both in the cognitive and affective domains to support students towards becoming self-directed leaners in preparing themselves to learn engineering in the university. The scaffolding includes, for example, the way the real-world sustainable development-themed problem is design and divided into three parts, and the use of the Cooperative Problem-Based Learning framework to support students in learning and solving the problem in part, which were all geared to instill the awareness of the important role of engineers and develop skills in engineering processes.

This paper describes the design and implementation of Introduction to Engineering course for first year chemical engineering students. The findings of a qualitative exploratory study conducted to determine the impact of ITE on developing student understanding about engineering is presented. The results of the study are useful to understand how students can be taught in a manner that motivates and supports them to learn, and thus provide ideas and improve the way an introductory engineering course is conducted. In addition, the educational principles used as the basis of the design of the ITE course is included so that they may be used as the underlying principles when there is any need for modification to suit to the needs or constraints of another institution.

The ITE course is designed based on the How People Learn Framework (HPL) (Bransford et al., 2004) and Constructive Alignment (Biggs and Tang, 2007). Based on constructivist principles, Constructive Alignment asserts that both the teaching and learning activities (TLAs) and the assessment tasks (ATs) should be aligned to and support the development of the learning outcomes among students. The HPL Framework, which comes from a meta-analysis of strong learning theories and research on learning, consists of four overlapping lenses that define an effective learning environment: knowledge, learner, assessment and community centered. To incorporate both educational principles, Problem-Based Learning (PBL) and Cooperative Learning (CL) are implemented as the teaching and learning approaches to learn and solve problems based on sustainable development.

PBL embeds small groups of students and presents them with an unstructured, realistic problem to solve. The problem is crafted to engage and immerse students in going through engineering processes to solve sustainability related issues. Students are guided through a Cooperative PBL (CPBL) cycle that helps them to identify the problem, construct new knowledge and provide a solution systematically. In this instructional framework, the team members must practice the five tenets of CL to develop functional learning teams (Smith, 1995). The five tenets are positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face interaction, appropriate interpersonal skills and regular self-assessment of group functioning. The CPBL framework, which is the infusion of CL principles into the PBL cycle, has three phases, as shown in Fig. 1. The framework can be used to visualize the CPBL process to support students in grasping the whole process, as well as for facilitators to explain the significance of each step in terms of the outcomes and activities in each block, as they go through each of the three phases in the CPBL cycle.

Phase 1 of the CPBL cycle consists of the problem identification and analysis. Students individually write a problem restatement and identification (PR & PI) to invoke construction of their own understanding before coming to class for discussions with their team members. Phase 2 consists of learning, application and solution formulation. In phase 2, the aim is to have learners develop the skill to learn new material, synthesize and apply them to formulate a solution. The outcome is for learners to take responsibility for their own learning. Phase 3 is generalization, internalization and closure. In phase 3, the outcome is to have learners critically evaluate the final solution from each team, and use meta-cognitive skills to internalize and generalize the concepts and skills learned. More details on the CPBL model can be seen in (Mohd-Yusof et al., 2011). The CPBL model has been shown to create an effective learning environment that nurtures team-based problem solving skills as well as enhance motivation and learning strategies among undergraduate engineering students (Mohd-Yusof et al., 2016; Helmi et al., 2016).

The Introduction to Engineering (ITE) course is a three-credit hour course with 30–40 students in each class. There are multiple sections, facilitated by different lecturers. Student teams were formed to ensure a heterogeneous group, including gender, ethnic, cultural background and English proficiency. Heterogeneous groups promote diverse thinking and provide opportunities for students to develop feelings of mutual understanding. Each group needs to have diversity so that professional skills related to interpersonal and team-working skills can be acquired. Referring to Table 1, students go through several ice-breaking activities during the first week of the course to help them bond and create a team identity. Each team wrote and signed a team contract containing the rules of conduct, responsibilities and policies on how to handle conflicting issues and disputes.

From Table 1, the course consists of a short project on overview of engineering, the profession and its requirements, basic calculations of common process variables and unit conversion using active learning, introduction to engineering ethics using case studies and a problem on sustainable development (SD) using cooperative problem-based learning.

The engineering overview assignment is the first team-based assignment for the students in the course. Students are asked to find the definition of engineering from literature, and based on certain specific questions on engineering, they are asked to interview at least two practicing engineers. Students would produce a two-page report and give a short group presentation on their understanding of engineering and the answer the question given, based on information found from literature and interviews with engineers. A more detailed description and the impact of this assignment can be seen in Mohd-Yusof et al. (2014).

The problem given in the ITE course, as seen in Table 1, is set in a real world setting with the involvement of stakeholders and is designed to integrate the three pillars of sustainable development. In the 2014/2015 session, the problem was focused on sustainable water resources for communities in UTM and its surrounding areas. The problem is “packaged” properly to make it realistic for immersing and engaging students. For example, brochures, posters or letters from the relevant authorities were made to describe the main problem or issues, which can also be posed as a competition. A sample brochure can be found in Appendix A.

Since this problem is at an initial stage and it is for the first year students, it is written in a straightforward manner. The problem is designed in three stages to gradually challenge students with increasing difficulty. Each stage moves the student closer and closer to the final goal, the final documentation of the problem solution. Although these stages are sequential, feedback exists between stages, which systematically provide the necessary support to scaffold students' learning.

Stage 1 is for learning about SD, finding information on current world scenario, and bench-marking. Stage 2 is focused on the specific element of SD, data collection and analysis of the students' and families' consumption or generation, and pattern of behaviour. In Stage 3, students propose some of the best engineering solutions and cost analysis. All team members will have worked on all three analytical problems and interact with their team members, as well as with students from other teams. At the end of the semester, during the competition, the panel of judges, consisting of experts in the area would be invited to evaluate students’ innovative products.

At the end of each stage, progress reports would be submitted and assessed based on team efforts. Marks received by individual student from the project report are multiplied with an auto-rating factor (Kaufmann et al., 1999) calculated based on the peer rating at the end of each problem. Finally, after the report presentation and submission, students are expected to write a reflection journal. To ensure that they take the journal and the peer rating seriously, explanations are given on the purpose of all activities, and what they would get from doing them. For example, the reflection is for evaluating their own actions and thoughts, and internalizing what they have learned from the assignment, and how they can improve or do things better in the future. The peer rating is to evaluate their team performance, and what they need to do to improve and develop better team working for the coming assignment. To assess their team performances, the students are basically asked to do a "plus-delta" format, where the plus are positive actions that are practiced and should be maintained, and the deltas are the matters or actions that need to be taken to improve how the team works.

The objectives of the study are to investigate the impact of the course on the students’ understanding on engineering and to identify the professional skills enhancement that students developed as they go through Introduction to Engineering course. This study was conducted on 135 first year chemical engineering students in the Introduction to Engineering course during the Semester 1 of 2014/2015 academic session.