This paper was presented at the 2008 Engineering Conference - Innovation Good Practice and Research in Engineering Education.
Prior to 2004 Mechanical Engineering students at the University of British Columbia (UBC) took 15 disparate courses during the second year. The resulting artificial separation between related material in these courses caused many students to compartmentalise information along course lines and made it difficult for instructors to collaborate on the delivery of complementary content and draw connections between subjects.
In 2004 the UBC Mechanical Engineering Department replaced its entire Second Year undergraduate curriculum with a new programme called “Mech 2”. The primary innovation of Mech 2 was to rearrange the content of the previous Second Year courses into an integrated curriculum. Students take only one course at a time and teaching is done by a committed team of 14 instructors collaborating from five departments and two faculties. Instructors teaching related topics cooperate to ensure optimal timing of the material and to emphasise and reinforce natural connections between subjects. The courses in Mech 2 also involve many different coordinated learning activities such as classes tutorials labs design projects presentations and field trips. The last three activities were instated particularly to increase the “handson” and professional training that students receive.
Programme surveys have shown students prefer Mech 2 to a conventional curriculum (70% positive response) and they perceive Mech 2 as being more effective at integrating diverse subject matter (90% positive response). A statistical analysis of student performance shows that students who have taken Mech 2 have higher averages and fail fewer courses than students from the conventional programme.
