Informal Learning as Opportunity for Competency Development and Broadened Engagement in Engineering

Informal learning is increasingly being recognized as a way to complement the formal curriculum within engineering and provide additional opportunities for competency development while engaging diverse students. Learning about engineering occurs throughout life, via experiential and spontaneous opportunities that inform our understandings of the world. Learning is not confined to the engineering curriculum and class time but, rather, continues informally and implicitly throughout the daily lives and activities of university students. Often framed in contrast to formal learning, informal learning is more as it represents a significant portion of students’ time and effort and contributes to their persistence, competence development, and broadened engagement. This chapter provides an overview of informal learning, discussing its definition, history, and settings and activities relevant to engineering education. The second section of the chapter focuses on the benefits and outcomes of informal learning, related to competency development and engagement of diverse learners. The third section identifies implications and provides recommendations for engineering researchers and practitioners to study, integrate, and recognize informal learning as an opportunity to prepare the current and future generations of engineers for 21st-century challenges, via cultivating the requisite competencies and engaging students with a range of backgrounds and experiences