Design and Development of a Smart Cities General Education Online Course for Undergraduates

In this paper, a design and development of a Smart Cities general education (Gen Ed) online course for undergraduates have been presented. In this design, a detailed description of course contents, course modality, access to materials, and a typical assessment scheme have been presented, So far, this ENGR 202 (An Introduction to Smart Cities) course has been taught successfully to the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Green Bay, USA, students for the last two years every January and summer terms respectively with 3 weeks and 4 weeks in duration. Thus far, the course has been very successful in providing the students with an introduction to the smart cities and their functionalities. Experience learnt from teaching this course has been presented in this paper. The detailed design of this Gen Ed course has been presented in such a way that the same or a similar course could also be designed and taught at another academic institution as a Gen Ed course. Finally, this course also stands as an example that an engineering course can successfully contribute to the Gen Ed course pool of an institution reducing the historical gap between engineering and Gen Ed curricula moving forward.