Developing, Pilot-Testing, and Evaluating an Approach to Teach Technical and Professional Communication Skills in an Introductory Engineering Course

In an English-speaking international engineering school, a need was identified to integrate professional and technical communication content to better prepare students for communicating about technical content throughout their programs. To help build a common foundation for all students from different English backgrounds/levels, such content might be included in a first semester required course. This paper describes how we developed, pilot-tested, and evaluated a strategy to integrate communication content into an online introductory engineering course of ~500 students. We developed an asynchronous curriculum covering micro (words and sentences), macro (paragraphs, overall documents, and evidence-based writing), and professional (netiquette and tonality especially in emails) writing skills. Assessments’ results show that students mostly understood and applied macro and professional skills, and to a slightly lesser extent, micro writing skills. This indicates that they were more engaged in modules relevant to their engineering disciplines than basic English writing skills. Our analysis thus suggests that the integrated modules in this introductory course are essential to introduce discipline-specific communication skills to engineering students.