Faculty of Engineering Education members, Charles Patrick Jr, Daniel Alge, and Charles Peak recently had a publication in the journal of Biomedical Engineering Education. Overall, their involvement in IEEI helped to motivate the interest in publishing the results, not just having them for internal use. Charles Patrick says, “The peer group I was in 2020-2021 helped to ease me into the process and encouraged me to take the time for an education publication.”
The paper talks about how it is sometimes difficult for faculty to teach courses effectively and to prepare students for careers in the field of biomedical engineering when there are gaps, redundancies, and bottlenecks in the curriculum.
A review of curriculum continuity was prompted by faculty observations of potential curriculum deficiencies, the rapidly changing landscape of biomedical engineering education, the changing workplaces of biomedical engineers, as well as accreditation agencies’ mandates to continuously improve.
The paper presents a seven-step Curriculum Continuity Checkup Process (C3P) that focuses on clarifying course learning outcomes, developing a comprehensive set of curriculum outcomes, and developing a curriculum map to identify gaps, redundancies, and bottlenecks in a process-oriented manner.
The results of this study and implications for curriculum revision and conclusions about the use of the C3P in biomedical engineering education are discussed as well. They are currently using the results of the curriculum review to comprehensively redesign the entire undergraduate curriculum (Charles Patrick is chairing the curriculum redesign effort and Charles Peak is chairing the engineering design component of the curriculum).
The link to the publication is tx.ag/curriculumcontinuity