Strengthening professional development with an instructional design for an interdisciplinary undergraduate-level engineering course

Faculty professional development has long been a critical component of higher education. The 1950s and 1960s were the eras of scholars with a focus on research skills and productivity. In the 1970s, development moved into the era of the teacher, focusing on improving teaching skills and abilities. The 1980s were the era of the developer, where development departed, and faculty-centric programs (teaching and research) began to emerge. The 1990s were the era of the learner, with the focus shifting from teaching to learning. Today, we are in the era of teamwork/network, which focuses on "collaboration across faculty to encourage interdisciplinarity. There were two folds of this study. This study explored the impact of project-oriented problem-based learning on university students' engineering creativity through a quasi-experimental design. The experimental curriculum was designed and put into practice by three professors from different professional fields and incorporated three key concepts: participatory design, future thinking, and visual communication. Design thinking was the course's main axis. The experimental group consisted of 19 undergraduate students in the Engineering Design for Society course, while the control group of 23 Civil Engineering undergraduates participated in the Civil Engineering Design course. The findings are: (1) The experimental group received significantly higher creativity scores on fluency, flexibility, originality, and usefulness. (2) The control group's scores regressed on the post-test. (3) The experimental group's higher scores indicated that interdisciplinary teaching combined with innovative pedagogy can promote engineering creativity through solving problems from multi-faceted perspectives. The implications of this study for engineering creativity learning apropos future engineering demands are discussed.