COMPARISON OF THE CIVIL ENGINEERING CURRICULUM AMONG SEVERAL CANADIAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

Growing attention to environmental sustainability, modular construction, and application of new generation of materials, accompanied with advanced data collection techniques and computer modeling, has revolutionized the area of Civil Engineering within the past few years. This demonstrates the necessity of continually reviewing the curriculum to assure that graduating engineers are knowledgeable enough to deal with complex problems in their area of specialty. This is also essential to satisfy the continual improvement process (CIP) requirements mandated by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB). As a first step to design a rigorous CIP, a comprehensive comparison was made between the Civil Engineering curricula of the University of Alberta (UofA) and eight other major universities across Canada, including the University of Calgary, University of Toronto, McGill University, University of Windsor, University of Regina, University of British Columbia (UBC), University of Waterloo, and Polytechnic of Montreal. After categorizing the courses into twelve different streams, it was observed that some universities paid less attention to a specific stream in comparison with the average, which could be identified as a gap in the curriculum. A capstone design or group design project that is multidisciplinary and covers multiple areas of specialty is the predominant approach followed by most of the universities.