TY - JOUR
T1 - Deconstructing engineering education programmes
T2 - The deep project to reform the mechanical engineering curriculum
AU - Busch-Vishniac, Ilene
AU - Kibler, Tom
AU - Campbell, Patricia B.
AU - Patterson, Eann
AU - Guillaume, Darrell
AU - Jarosz, Jeffrey
AU - Chassapis, Constantin
AU - Emery, Ashley
AU - Ellis, Glenn
AU - Whitworth, Horace
AU - Metz, Susan
AU - Brainard, Suzanne
AU - Ray, Pradosh
PY - 2011/6
Y1 - 2011/6
N2 - The goal of the Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes project is to revise the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. The process involved dissecting each course into topics at roughly the level of a line in a syllabus, editing the list of topics, associating prerequisites and successors to each topic and then using a genetic algorithm to produce clusters of topics. The new curriculum, which consists of 12 clusters, each of which could be a full year course, is quite different from the traditional curriculum.
AB - The goal of the Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes project is to revise the mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum to make the discipline more able to attract and retain a diverse community of students. The project seeks to reduce and reorder the prerequisite structure linking courses to offer greater flexibility for students. This paper describes the methods used to study the prerequisites and the resulting proposed curriculum revision. The process involved dissecting each course into topics at roughly the level of a line in a syllabus, editing the list of topics, associating prerequisites and successors to each topic and then using a genetic algorithm to produce clusters of topics. The new curriculum, which consists of 12 clusters, each of which could be a full year course, is quite different from the traditional curriculum.
KW - Engineering education
KW - Mechanical engineering
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79960309962&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1080/03043797.2011.579590
DO - 10.1080/03043797.2011.579590
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79960309962
SN - 0304-3797
VL - 36
SP - 269
EP - 283
JO - European Journal of Engineering Education
JF - European Journal of Engineering Education
IS - 3
ER -