Through a curriculum reform initiative, The University of Texas at Austin is developing "signature courses" for freshman undergraduate students. These courses expose students to a variety of subjects and engage them in a variety of skill sets. These are "signature" courses because they are developed and taught by the university's top teaching faculty, where the goals are to foster a scholarly community and to create the most interesting and meaningful classes possible. Embarking on its third year, Undergraduate Studies 302: The Engineered World: Products and Innovations, focuses on innovation in the context of the engineering design process. This course is team taught, featuring two tenured Mechanical Engineering professors and two doctorial candidates (one in Mechanical Engineering and the other in Education, Curriculum and Teaching). Due to the phased implementation of the curriculum reform, the college of engineering does not yet require undergraduate students to take a signature course. Resulting from this situation, non-engineering majors populate this engineering signature course. As part of the development of this new course, we carefully documented curriculum development and assessment, thereby facilitating communication among the teaching team members. To this end the teaching team maintains a lesson diary of the course. Assessment of the course is continually monitored through directed discussion of the course with students, review of work produced by the students, and written reflection of the course by the students. The written reflections are discussed within the class and show that the students are gaining a deep understanding of the engineering design concepts and are actively engaged in the course. Students connect to this course of study through the use of active learning methods, including hands-on activities, inductive and deductive reasoning opportunities, and multimodal experiences. Further, group work is enhanced by considering ways to group students based upon personality types and other team-formation strategies rather than relying on self-formed teams.
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