Reforming Engineering Education: Multidisciplinary Engineering

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The recent establishment of a new Department of Engineering Education (DEED) at Purdue University has laid the solid foundation of planning for a sustainable four-year, pedagogically supported, multidisciplinary curriculum that gives students rich, scholarly interconnections and builds bridges among disciplines. This project is implementing a new multidisciplinary engineering (MDE) program of study, housed in DEED. It comes at a time when fast-moving, global multidisciplinary industrial environments require graduates to have not only the traditional technical knowledge of their predecessors but also a new and broader skill set. The MDE program will allow flexible and sustainable responses to emerging technologies. The core curriculum of the newly developed MDE courses is focusing on multidisciplinary themes, integrating research and teaching, and emphasizing team skills. Innovative core courses are being devised around research themes that cut across traditional discipline boundaries and systematically exposing students to emerging research. Classes are being taught by teams of leading research faculty in the signature areas of emphasis for engineering at Purdue and are incorporating critical findings by experts in learning, pedagogy, and assessment fields to build a solid educational foundation.