Collaborative partnerships: writing in the engineering classroom (using undergraduate course assistants from the english department to improve the writing skills of engineering students)

Teaching effective communication skills to engineering students, especially first year students in large classes, can be a time-consuming, labor-intensive endeavor. This paper describes an instructional system that employs undergraduate course assistants (UCA's) from the liberal arts college, typically the English department, to promote effective written communication skills of freshman engineering students. The paper presents information from an interactive session held at FIE 2004 and a case study of a program that has been used successfully at our university and which can serve as a template to create a similar learning experience in other institutions. The key component of this system is the training program for the UCA's. It has been observed that, by incorporating the use of UCA's into the engineering classroom, especially in Freshman Programs, the written communication skills of engineering students can be improved without increasing the workload of the primary instructor.