Programs, Pedagogy, and Process: Institution-Wide Improvement of Undergraduate Education at The Colorado School of Mines

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At the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) we are about to enter the fourth year of a comprehensive curriculum improvement process undertaken in response to concerns about systemic problems in engineering education. To date we have developed a mission statement and a set of attributes which we wish all graduates of the School to achieve including technical depth and breadth, communication skills, international awareness, flexibility, and ethics. We have also studied our current curriculum and the curricula at other leading engineering schools and have developed a tentative framework for a new curriculum in which we emphasize programs, pedagogy, and process. In the next few years we plan to build on existing excellent programs at CSM to develop a design-across-the curriculum program, a sequence of Systems courses, and an enhanced and thoroughly integrated humanities and social sciences component. In addition, we will build on our long teaching history and our Office of Teaching Effectiveness to explore the best pedagogies for these new programs and to prepare faculty for teaching in them. Finally, we will incorporate a refined assessment/continuous improvement program into our new curriculum. This program will grow out of our already mature and well-recognized state-mandated portfolio assessment program. As we develop, pilot, and fully implement a unique undergraduate engineering curriculum, our tangible products will include new texts, laboratory experiments, and hard copy and multimedia course materials. More importantly, we will produce students who are better prepared for science and engineering careers and faculty who are better prepared to teach them. Over the long-term, this project will help continue our transformation from an institution focused on teaching to one focused on learning. Our project can serve as benchmark for both the products and the process of curricular revision elsewhere.