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Engineering: Curriculum 2000

In 1995, the College of Engineering began a systematic examination of its undergraduate curriculum with the appointment of an Undergraduate Curriculum Task Force charged by the Dean to review the state of the curriculum and to propose necessary changes. Task Force members included faculty representatives from every undergraduate program, students and alumni. The Task Force, chaired by Michael Parsons, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at the time, examined the recommendations of numerous national studies on engineering education, including those produced by the National Research Council, American Society for Engineering Education and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology. Input was also sought from students and alumni and from the College’s National Advisory Committee. The national studies, input from constituents, and analyses within the college and each department recognized the need to address the increasingly broad educational needs of engineers.

The report of the Task Force, Michigan Curriculum 2000: Proposed Changes to the Undergraduate Curriculum, was completed in April 1996. Discussions and reviews were held, and on the basis of these the faculty approved the mission and objectives that form the fundamental basis and framework of Engineering’s ongoing curricular revisions.

Curriculum revisions maintain the traditionally strong technical content of the undergraduate engineering curriculum, while addressing the growing need for all engineering students to develop excellent team, leadership, and communication skills; achieve a greater awareness of ethical and environmental issues; be able to deal with uncertainty using logical and formal approaches; and understand the role of the engineering profession in society.

These issues are being addressed through the introduction of a first-year engineering course and through programmatic changes in the departments, especially laboratory and design courses. Curricular revisions also provide students with greater flexibility in choosing a course of study that best meets their academic and career goals, including direct entry into an engineering career or the pursuit of advanced degrees in engineering, business, law, and other areas.

Engineering is nearing the end of a four-year process for redesigning its entire undergraduate curriculum. In 2000-2001 the implementation of this comprehensive change will be completed with revisions to the senior year.

Specific recommendations being implemented include:

LS&A curriculum initiatives

The College of Literature, Science, and the Arts has also undertaken intensive reviews of its curriculum in recent years. Recommendations from the Planning Committee on the Undergraduate Experience (1990) led to a Subcommittee on Graduation and Distribution Requirements, whose report in 1991 utilized data from student focus groups and transcript analysis to suggest that the existing patterns of distribution courses needed to be modified. This information was employed by the College Curriculum Committee in 1995 to redesign the Area Distribution requirement , consolidating three different plans into a single, simplified plan to make the educational goals of the requirement more transparent to students. The Committee also reassessed each of the courses certified to meet the requirement, resulting in a renewed faculty focus on, as well as an increased student awareness of, the objectives of the requirement itself and the ways in which individual courses contributed to it.

A further outcome of the assessment performed by the Subcommittee on Graduation and Distribution Requirements was its recommendation that the College explore the possibility of introducing Academic Minors (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/saa/minors.html) into the curriculum. In 1998 a task force on academic minors was convened for this purpose. This group collected data from more detailed and targeted student focus groups, transcript analysis and faculty and academic advisor focus groups to determine that two of the learning objectives of the Area Distribution requirement were not being met by students. These were the objectives of attaining some measure of subject matter coherence within breadth of study, and of gaining interdisciplinary learning experiences. The task force found that students would benefit from an incentive to create coherent groupings of distribution courses along thematic and interdisciplinary lines, and thus recommended that academic minors be created as a mechanism to provide this incentive. The faculty immediately acted on these recommendations by approving, in the Winter of 1999, the introduction of optional academic minors into the curriculum.

Nursing

The School of Nursing is currently redesigning the baccalaureate nursing curriculum. The goal is to provide the best preparation for anticipated changes that will dramatically alter the nature of health care delivery. The School of Nursing expects to assume a national leadership role in designing and implementing an undergraduate nursing curriculum that emphasizes evidence-based practice, leadership, critical thinking, communication and accountability. In order to meet the goal of preparing a "reflective practitioner," coursework in nursing will begin in the first year of the four-year curriculum, providing an early foundation in principles of leadership, group work and ethics. In order to provide a comparable experience for transfer students who would otherwise miss some of the critical foundation coursework, a transitional curriculum is planned.