Work in Progress: Transformational Change in a Masters-level Integrated Capstone Design Course that Partners Industry and Academia

Integrated capstone design courses in civil engineering pose a major challenge for educators because of the breadth of topics covered. Partnering with industry has historically provided a way to alleviate some of these challenges and provide a more authentic design experience. While external partnership in capstone design courses can provide added authenticity as well as fringe benefits such as networking opportunities, there are risks associated with an industry-driven approach. We also argue there is a need to shift from an emphasis on product to pedagogy in capstone design and that authenticity from industry is not an end in itself. In this work-in-progress paper, we present our project to reimagine the integrated capstone design course at a large, public research university in the United Kingdom. This project has three major goals: (1) Develop an understanding of how to balance industry involvement; (2) Generate mechanisms for sustainable adoption of changes; and (3) Evaluate short- and long-term student outcomes for the course. We will present an overview of our intended curricular changes as well as research and evaluation plans to date. This project fits uniquely in the current literature on engineering design education in that it centers around a masters-level course and challenges the notion of what constitutes healthy industry partnership. As a starting point, our first research question considers how the current capstone design course came to be a primarily outsourced effort and what factors impacted this organizational shift to lower academic ownership from within the department