Board 7: Work in Progress: A Collaborative, Principle-focused Curriculum Design Process for a BME Undergraduate Program

Shannon Barker; Brian P. Helmke; Lynn Mandeltort; Jessica Taggart; Timothy E. Allen

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Biomedical Engineering Division (BED) Poster Session
Tagged Division: Biomedical Engineering Division (BED)
Permanent URL: https://strategy.asee.org/48367

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Paper Authors

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Shannon Barker University of Virginia

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Dr Shannon Barker is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at UVA BME

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Brian P. Helmke University of Virginia orcid.org/0000-0001-9897-4097

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Brian Helmke is Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he teaches courses in diverse topics such as physiology, mechanobiology, biotransport, and bioelectricity. Brian also serves as Faculty Consultant to the UVA Center for Teaching Excellence, acting as facilitator for the Course Design Institute and faculty development workshops on Equity in Collaborative Learning, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and Specifications Grading. As former Director of Undergraduate Research for the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science, Brian created Starting an Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE), a student-led program to lower barriers to entry in research experiences for 1st-year engineering students. Brian has received the Harold S. Morton Teaching Prize for excellence in 1st- and 2nd-year teaching in engineering, and he is a BMES Fellow. Brian is co-founder and Deputy Editor in Chief of the journal Biomedical Engineering Education. Brian’s science and engineering research interests include cardiovascular physiology, cellular mechanobiology, and nanotechnology-based biomaterials.

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Lynn Mandeltort University of Virginia

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Jessica Taggart University of Virginia

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Jessica Taggart is an Assistant Director in the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia, where she leads Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) programming and supports curriculum (re)design efforts.

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Timothy E. Allen University of Virginia orcid.org/0000-0001-5768-6339

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Dr. Timothy E. Allen is a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He received a B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Allen's teaching activities include coordinating the undergraduate teaching labs and the Capstone Design sequence in the BME department at the University of Virginia, and his research interests are in the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. He is also interested in evaluating the pedagogical approaches optimal for teaching lab concepts and skills, computational modeling approaches, and professionalism within design classes. He is active within the Biomedical Engineering Division of the American Society for Engineering Education and previously served on the executive committee of this division (Program Chair 2011, Division Chair 2012, and Nominating Committee Chair 2013). For the past seven years, he has also been the PI on an NSF REU site focused on multi-scale systems bioengineering and biomedical data sciences, a collaboration involving faculty in SEAS, SOM, SDS, and CLAS at UVA, as well as six partner institutions in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast. Dr. Allen has been the recipient of 11 teaching awards and honors and is an elected Fellow of AIMBE.

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Abstract

Biomedical engineers (BME) apply engineering principles to solve problems in biology and medicine and have contributed to revolutionary and life-saving concepts, such as artificial organs, advanced prosthetics, and new pharmaceuticals. As their impact on healthcare and society is significant, how BMEs learn to approach a problem is critical. What role should a BME play in deciding how gene editing is used in humans? How can a BME ensure that a medical decision-making algorithm serves all demographics equally? Given that today’s societal challenges are growing more complex, a new kind of engineer is required. Future engineers must consider the ethical and societal implications of their work, develop and implement systems of greater and greater complexity, and be prepared to live and work as global citizens, working in diverse groups and diverse contexts. ABET’s new Engineering Learning Outcomes and new addition of ethics, inclusivity, and empathy creates a need to address these new areas in a BME curriculum, and each department must determine how this is done in their specific program and educational environment. To ensure that undergraduate students graduate with the knowledge, tools, and experiences needed to meet these desired outcomes, and to ensure the curriculum meets the changing requirements and suggestions of accreditation bodies and professional societies, an effective continuous improvement process must be in place. A key process component often overlooked is the curriculum design process itself. An undergraduate BME program at a top R1 university, in close partnership with its teaching center, is currently undergoing an undergraduate curriculum design process as part of its continuous improvement cycle.

Under its curriculum design program, the teaching center facilitators have begun guiding department faculty through a collaborative curriculum design project. Five key design principles drive the project: 1) an emphasis on equitable experiences and outcomes for students, along with equitable participation in the design process by multiple stakeholders; 2) an emphasis on purposeful and intentional curriculum design decisions; 3) the implementation of a design process that is transparent to stakeholders and that results in a curriculum in which goals, requirements, and pathways are transparent; 4) a centering of student learning in all curricular decisions; and 5) an emphasis on alignment between our goals for student learning, curricular pathways, course objectives, teaching pedagogies, and assessment. Using these key principles and evidence-based best practices, and taking advantage of the department’s collaborative culture around undergraduate education, BME and the teaching center carried out a step-by-step, stakeholder-informed, process used to formulate eight new curricular learning objectives for BME’s undergraduate program. Additionally, for each new objective, a Proficiencies Rubric was developed that reflects what student learning should look like across the curriculum for that objective at the Exposed, Familiar, and Depth levels. These Rubrics will be used to map our current courses with the new objectives and explore opportunities for course revisions or re-sequencing, and as part of a continued improvement process where incremental changes can be quantitatively tracked over time. This paper reviews that step-by-step process and overall timeline used to complete this phase of the curriculum design project. Future work will focus on implementation of the Rubrics, actions taken to adapt courses to our new objectives, and the assessment process developed to measure changes made over time.

Citation
Format

Barker, S., & Helmke, B. P., & Mandeltort, L., & Taggart, J., & Allen, T. E. (2024, June), Board 7: Work in Progress: A Collaborative, Principle-focused Curriculum Design Process for a BME Undergraduate Program Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://strategy.asee.org/48367

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Biomedical engineers (BME) apply engineering principles to solve problems in biology and medicine and have contributed to revolutionary and life-saving concepts, such as artificial organs, advanced prosthetics, and new pharmaceuticals. As their impact on healthcare and society is significant, how BMEs learn to approach a problem is critical. What role should a BME play in deciding how gene editing is used in humans? How can a BME ensure that a medical decision-making algorithm serves all demographics equally? Given that today’s societal challenges are growing more complex, a new kind of engineer is required. Future engineers must consider the ethical and societal implications of their work, develop and implement systems of greater and greater complexity, and be prepared to live and work as global citizens, working in diverse groups and diverse contexts. ABET’s new Engineering Learning Outcomes and new addition of ethics, inclusivity, and empathy creates a need to address these new areas in a BME curriculum, and each department must determine how this is done in their specific program and educational environment. 
 
To ensure that undergraduate students graduate with the knowledge, tools, and experiences needed to meet these desired outcomes, and to ensure the curriculum meets the changing requirements and suggestions of accreditation bodies and professional societies, an effective continuous improvement process must be in place. A key process component often overlooked is the curriculum design process itself. An undergraduate BME program at a top R1 university, in close partnership with its teaching center, is currently undergoing an undergraduate curriculum design process as part of its continuous improvement cycle.

Under its curriculum design program, the teaching center facilitators have begun guiding department faculty through a collaborative curriculum design project. Five key design principles drive the project: 1) an emphasis on equitable experiences and outcomes for students, along with equitable participation in the design process by multiple stakeholders; 2) an emphasis on purposeful and intentional curriculum design decisions; 3) the implementation of a design process that is transparent to stakeholders and that results in a curriculum in which goals, requirements, and pathways are transparent; 4) a centering of student learning in all curricular decisions; and 5) an emphasis on alignment between our goals for student learning, curricular pathways, course objectives, teaching pedagogies, and assessment.
 
Using these key principles and evidence-based best practices, and taking advantage of the department’s collaborative culture around undergraduate education, BME and the teaching center carried out a step-by-step, stakeholder-informed, process used to formulate eight new curricular learning objectives for BME’s undergraduate program. Additionally, for each new objective, a Proficiencies Rubric was developed that reflects what student learning should look like across the curriculum for that objective at the Exposed, Familiar, and Depth levels. These Rubrics will be used to map our current courses with the new objectives and explore opportunities for course revisions or re-sequencing, and as part of a continued improvement process where incremental changes can be quantitatively tracked over time. This paper reviews that step-by-step process and overall timeline used to complete this phase of the curriculum design project. Future work will focus on implementation of the Rubrics, actions taken to adapt courses to our new objectives, and the assessment process developed to measure changes made over time.


AU  - Shannon Barker
AU  - Brian P. Helmke
AU  - Lynn Mandeltort
AU  - Jessica Taggart
AU  - Timothy E. Allen
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Board 7: Work in Progress: A Collaborative, Principle-focused Curriculum Design Process for a BME Undergraduate Program
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/48367
ER  -