Meshing goals: Bringing a Computer-Aided Engineering course with Biomedical Applications, Engineering Communications, and FDA Reporting guidelines into alignment towards stronger student outcomes

A 10-year working partnership between engineering instructors and communication instructors for a course called “Computer-Aided Engineering: Applications to Biomedical Process” aims to enrich the professional skills of the engineering students overall. This paper provides a window to the ways the course aids students in improving their engineering/technical writing and presenting skills. This year, an added influence came with the incorporation of new FDA guidelines for biomedical computational modeling, released in September 2016. We report on this integration, why such an infusion of professional-level guidelines is desirable for an academic course, and provide an overview of the partnered courses (biomedical and communication), briefly covering how one might consider ABET alignments. We hope to set out a useful roadmap for other university instructors in how they might align their course deliverables with “real world” expectations and guidelines while addressing the complexity of classroom expectations versus professional expectations of communicative ability.