What Does Information Mean to Me as an Engineer? Fostering Engineering Students’ Holistic Competencies in the Informational World

This Research Work in Progress Paper aims to develop holistic competencies in engineering students through course-level teaching and learning activities. Information is the core of many engineering fields, such as communications engineering, signal processing, and computational intelligence. Despite its ambient existence in our everyday lives, most of the engineering students are not aware of the connection between information and their professional role as an engineer in the informational world. We seek to engage engineering students in understanding their professional and ethical responsibility, and promote their awareness of the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context. Our study is grounded in the intersection between two theoretical frameworks: (1) Holistic Competencies and (2) William Perry’s scheme of intellectual and ethical development. Having students’ learning evidence against William Perry’s framework and identified students’ cognitive changes along their course study, we suggest that holistic competencies can be fostered through cultivating students’ multifaceted understanding of information and supplementing with real cases where social media serve as a channel for students to exchange ideas to address various global challenges.