ACHIEVING CIVIL ENGINEERING BOK2 OUTCOMES OF GLOBALIZATION, LEADERSHIP, PROFESSIONAL AND ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY AND TEAM WORK IN A GENERAL EDUCATION CLASS

摘要

Our college has recently developed a new course titled "Moral Leadership in a Technological World." The class was created to address the need to help educate leaders who understand and are prepared to address the emerging global world environment from an integrated moral, technical, and social perspective. This course effectively encompasses the civil engineering BOK2 outcomes of leadership, globalization and ethics. In addition, the theory and practice of teamwork is a major component of the class. The course has been approved by the university to fulfill students' general education requirements in both social science and global and cultural awareness. Our civil and environmental engineering department now requires all majors to complete this class. Since the course is an approved general education class any student registered at the university can enroll. Since the motivation for the course originates from incentives at the college level, the teaching load is distributed among five engineering and technology units within the college. Open university enrollment for the course is leading to very large sections. However, the chance to teach these important concepts to the general university student body provides a unique opportunity to introduce a broad cross section of students to critical global issues from an engineering perspective. This paper begins by providing motivation from both the National Academy of Engineering and the American Society of Civil Engineers to engineering educators to provide more content in leadership, professional ethics, knowledge of global technical issues, and a more complete understanding of the world's cultures. These topics aid the engineering professions in effectively working in the global arena and becoming more engaged in public activities. The paper continues by describing the university criteria the course must satisfy to be approved to fulfill both Social Science and Global and Cultural Awareness general education requirements. In addition, the various course modules that address the Civil Engineering BOK2 outcomes of globalization, leadership, professional and ethical responsibility, and teamwork are explained. Evaluations of these modules are shown. The college effort to effectively prepare the requisite faculty to teach the course is also described. Finally, potential embedded indicators are suggested that could be used for ABET assessment.