Integrating social impact throughout an engineering curriculum

CONTEXT The potential that engineering offers of making a positive impact on society motivates many students, yet most university courses only appeal explicitly to this motivation through add-on global experience or service-learning programs. Furthermore, there is an increasing body of research showing that such Social Impact programs lead to improved student outcomes, especially in the development of the professional skill-sets and mind-sets required in the 21st century engineering workforce. At Swinburne University of Technology, social impact is being integrated and embedded in a new curriculum, co-designed with industry partners, grounded in education research, and built around work-oriented pedagogies including project-based learning. Projects will be aligned with 4 Pillars: Emerging Technologies, Entrepreneurship, research & Development (research in lowercase to indicate the emphasis on Development), and Social Impact. This paper reports on the process of incorporating Social Impact into this new curriculum. PURPOSE How can Social Impact be integrated throughout an engineering curriculum? APPROACH Building from an industry co-design process of identifying and unpacking the suite of skills required to succeed and flourish as an engineering graduate, the next stage is developing the curriculum and learning experiences that will enable students to acquire these skills. Within the context of Social Impact, this process involves consulting the education research literature on developing these skills, input from prospective Social Impact project partners, comparison with related project-based and service-learning programs, and then further consultation and validation with industry stakeholders. RESULTS Several milestones have been reached in developing the Social Impact curriculum pillar. The key aspects distinguishing it from the other pillars have been identified as empathising and communicating with people from diverse backgrounds. A system of micro-credentials will be used as a framework for developing students’ skills, and some of these, such as human-centred design, thinking globally, and embracing diversity, have been mapped to Social Impact. At the time of writing, a Deep Dive curriculum workshop had just been held with industry stakeholders – the outcomes and analysis will be presented at the conference, along with an update on the curriculum development process. CONCLUSIONS By incorporating lessons learned from other programs around the world, evidence-based teaching strategies from the research literature, and ongoing consultation with prospective project partners and industry stakeholders, Swinburne University of Technology is in the process of developing a world-class new initiative to integrate Social Impact throughout the engineering curriculum.