Work in progress — Assessment and pilot delivery of an introduction to infrastructure course

Abstract

The infrastructure of the United States is exceeding its design capacity and is aging, requiring maintenance and renovation. In order to meet this challenge, a need exists to produce civil and environmental engineers who have a broad understanding of the pressing needs of the infrastructure of the United States. An “Introduction to Infrastructure” course (“I2I”) has been developed by the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville (UWP) to address this need. The course is intended for sophomore students and serves two main purposes in the curriculum: 1. To introduce the students to civil and environmental engineering and the sub-disciplines, and 2. To begin the development of an awareness of infrastructure and the challenges facing the United States with respect to infrastructure overcapacity and degradation. The focus of this paper is on the process by which the course was developed. Details of efforts to incorporate exemplary teaching materials in the course development will also be presented and the content of the course will be outlined. A particularly noteworthy aspect of the course is that students will be completing a simplified “infrastructure report card” for a local municipality. This simplified report card is modeled after the “Report Card for America's Infrastructure” produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers.