Long-distance collaboration, international perspective, and social responsibility through a shared interdisciplinary engineering design course

Today's societal characteristics are compelling engineering graduates to have a broader range of skills rather than the highly focused technical repertoire demanded of engineers in the past, including teamwork and communication skills 1, as well as an awareness of the effects of technologies on cultures, societies, and economies 2. In order to meet these needs, an undergraduate engineering design course has been developed as a collaborative effort between faculty members at two small liberal arts institutions separated by more than 800 miles. Each institution offers an ABET accredited engineering degree (Engineering Science and Industrial Engineering) and graduates similar to 7-12 engineers per year. In the shared course, engineering student virtual teams design and implement assistive technologies for persons with disabilities and underprivileged individuals for both local and global clients. The course is required for engineering majors from both institutions and is usually taken in the sophomore or junior year as a pre-capstone experience. Sharing expertise, capabilities, and faculty time are important considerations in developing the course because of the very small size of each school's departments. Overcoming the challenges of communicating long-distance with teammates as well as project collaboration at a distance are important aspects of the course. Long-distance collaboration is particularly important today as many engineers in industry now work at a distance with colleagues. In this paper, we will describe our course and describe a variety of lessons learned about this type of course and collaboration. A comparison of the course with and without the use of virtual teams suggests that students rate their multidisciplinary teamwork skills as being much more developed in the version of the course with virtual teams as compared to when team members are all at one campus.