Page 128 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

DESIGNING FROM A BLANK SLATE 111

interest. Each cohort option will link one course with a project; addi-
tional optional courses will add “flavors” to the project. For example, a
biotech specialization cohort could connect a biology course with a
project. Some students might take a computational science course as an
optional elective and focus their project on bioinformatics. A second
group might take entrepreneurship as the technical elective and focus
on biotech start-ups. Such projects are compelling both for students
and for prospective faculty, and they provide logical opportunities for
corporate involvement.
The junior year will be the ideal time for international study and
corporate experience. Because content in the specialization and real-
ization years is defined by institutionally determined learning objectives
and measured during Gates, students can easily design nontraditional
means of achieving those objectives.
The final year at Olin will be focused on an ambitious capstone
project that occupies at least half of the student’s time for the semester.
The precise structure of this capstone has not been entirely defined, but
it will certainly look quite a bit like professional practice. Also in the
final year, students will complete a culminating project in the hu-
manities. In many cases, we imagine this project will be connected with
the capstone project. Olin students are encouraged to pass the Funda-
mentals of Engineering exam, which is designed to encourage self-
study skills, open the door to professional practice, and provide external
validation of a student’s proficiency.

ABET Requirements
The Olin curriculum is designed to satisfy the accreditation require-
ments of ABET. We believe that our focus on institution-wide learning
objectives and our use of Gates to assess whether courses achieve desired
outcomes and to promote improvement of the curriculum are entirely
consistent with ABET’s philosophy of assessment, evaluation, and im-
provement. The emphasis on interdisciplinary, hands-on design projects
throughout the curriculum also meets ABET criteria. In addition, the
curriculum is designed to satisfy ABET’s mechanical engineering and
electrical and computer engineering requirements through the special-
ization cohorts, which will address precise learning objectives.

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