Development of a new curriculum for an industrial engineering program that meets the curriculum requirements of ABET and the institution

Abstract

The implementation of the assessment and evaluation processes in the Industrial Engineering (IE) Department at the Northern Border University (NBU) have identified a number of areas for improvement. The most important one is the necessity for the development of a new curriculum for the IE Program. Since the program of IE at the College of Engineering at NBU is seeking ABET accreditation, it must meet all the general and program criteria particularly the ABET curriculum requirements specifying subject areas appropriate to engineering (Math & Basic Sciences, Engineering topics and General education). At the beginning of the development of the new IE curriculum, the ABET curriculum requirement was not the unique requirement that had been considered by the IE department. The department has also taken into account the input from the Program constituencies, requirements of the National Accreditation Commission, input from the national and international benchmarks and input from the assessment and evaluation process. In addition to these inputs, a new rule has been fulfilled for the distribution of the courses on the years of study. Therein, the institution (NBU) has adopted a new rule that states that the grades earned by a student after the completion of the preparatory year will not be counted in the calculation of the Cumulative Grade Point Average (GPA) earned at the time the degree of Bachelor of Science is awarded. This new rule implies that the new IE curriculum should be built on 8 semesters instead of 10 semesters as was the case with the old IE curriculum. The objective of this paper is twofold: 1) to present and argue in favor of a new IE curriculum that will prepare, more efficiently, the students to achieve the student outcomes upon graduation and to achieve the program educational objectives during their careers (3 or 5 years after graduation) and 2) to present the methodology followed by the faculty for developing a new curriculum for IE Program while considering different constraints and inputs.