Teaching to the other side of campus: An engineering professor's experience with an Honors college course

Abstract

There is a great need in the United States to increase the overall technical literacy of the population. To help meet this need, engineering courses are being taught in grade schools and high schools across the country; such courses are increasing the interest of students to pursue engineering degrees in college and are teaching some of the thought processes used by engineers to the students. At the university level, there are the occasional engineering courses offered to non-engineering majors, but such courses are frequently low-level and often not taught by regular faculty. As such, students taking such courses may only receive a brief overview of the engineering discipline. Some have argued that engineering faculty need to do more to increase the technical literacy of a broad-spectrum of students. But putting non-majors in the mid-level or upper-level engineering courses often taught by faculty would result in overwhelmed students attempting to learn engineering course material without prerequisite knowledge; such an approach is likely to do more harm than good. An alternative approach is to develop courses for upper-level nonengineering students based on technical subjects that (a) are interesting and educational to the students, (b) do not rely on large amounts of prerequisite knowledge and mathematical skills, and (c) are taught by regular engineering faculty. Such courses can then be offered as elective courses to students in non-engineering disciplines. These courses would offer students in other disciplines the opportunity to learn about technical subjects of current importance from engineers with expertise in these areas, but without expecting mathematical rigor for which they may not be prepared. In this paper, the author describes his experiences with preparing and teaching a seminar course to non-engineering students offered through the Honors College at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The course was a general course about energy, and covered issues involving energy associated with transportation, electricity generation, and building systems. The paper discusses finding the appropriate level of coverage of the subject material, the challenges and opportunities with teaching in a seminar-style format, and setting appropriate expectations for upper-level students from a variety of non-engineering disciplines. The paper also includes lessons learned from the course so as to improve the course in future offerings.