Teams have become the default work structure in many organizations, however compared to industry representatives, both university educators and students have been found to underestimate the value of teamwork and communication skills (Nguyen, 1998). As such, teamwork skills are rarely “taught” in professional engineering curricula and instead, students are often expected to develop teamwork and leadership skills via a sink-or-swim approach (Lingard & Barkataki, 2011). This can lead to students who are underprepared to work effectively in industry.
In response, a committee of representatives from the Centre for Teaching and Learning, the Student Success Office and the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Waterloo are developing a series of integrated and experiential learning activities for students to acquire knowledge and confidence in their teamwork skills. This poster will focus on the design, development and assessment of the project in addition to providing insight on lessons learned and next steps. Emphasis will be placed on the transferability of the model to both engineering and non-engineering programs that could benefit from adopting a similar integrated and collaborative model of teamwork training.
Participants will be able to:
recall key successes and challenges of the program
know, at a high level, the instructional design approach, implementation plan and assessment methodology
infer the feasibility of adopting a similar initiative at their home institution
compare similar programs/initiatives in home institutions by evaluating our current program and process
Erin Jobidon works at the University of Waterloo in the Student Success Office as an Academic Development Specialist working with the Engineering, Math and Environment faculties.
