Achieving Scalability and Interactivity in a Communication Skills Course for Undergraduate Engineering Students

Abstract

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution:</i> This article describes and evaluates a novel undergraduate communication skills course for engineering students. The course focuses on improving student communication skills by using interactive lectures and authentic assessment activities in a scalable manner. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</i> Published studies and reports suggest communication skills are becoming increasingly important for young engineers. Accordingly, communication skills are often included in engineering curricula. Engineering graduates typically lack these skills because they underestimate the importance of communication skills, while methods in teaching and assessing these skills remain inadequate. Providing proper support to students in acquiring communication skills and subsequently assessing learning outcomes without significantly increasing teacher workload is a challenge. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Intended Outcomes:</i> The intended outcome described in this article involves a scalable approach to teaching communication skills to undergraduate engineering students. The approach focuses on interaction during live lectures, authentic activities, and technology to achieve efficiencies for a small number of teaching staff holding the course to a large student population. In line with the expectancy-value theory (EVT) framework, the expectation is that the approach will have a positive effect on student perceptions of the importance of communication skills, which predict positive learning outcomes. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Application Design:</i> The course includes live lectures, practical homework assignments, and other authentic activities like elevator pitching, participating in job interviews as well as workshops or presentations. The importance in live lectures is placed on achieving interactivity by using an audience response system (AuResS). A peer review approach is used to assess homework assignments. Data from a survey of students qualifying their perceptions of communication skills were collected four times during the semester and analyzed along with their final course percentage. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Findings:</i> The study findings suggest first-semester engineering students think communication skills are important for engineers, and particularly value the authentic activities implemented in the course, even though the activities required more work on their behalf. However, only a small, statistically significant correlation was found between student opinions on the importance of communication skills and their course achievements. The AuResS and peer review, essential from the teachers’ perspective, were successfully used to achieve scalability in learning and assessment under the conditions described in this article.