Design of an ECE Technical Communication Course for Accelerating Engineering Careers

Thomas Garrison; Yuchen Huang; Branimir Pejcinovic

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Conference: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Baltimore , Maryland
Publication Date: June 25, 2023
Start Date: June 25, 2023
End Date: June 28, 2023
Conference Session: Assessment-Driven Practices in ECE
Tagged Division: Electrical and Computer Engineering Division (ECE)
Page Count: 26
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--42949
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/42949
Download Count: 182

Paper Authors

biography

Thomas Garrison Portland State University

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Tom is a Vice President and General Manager at Intel Corporation leading the PC client strategy organization. He is a 29 year veteran of Intel ever since his graduation from Portland State University where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering in 1994. In his free time he is an avid fisherman.

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Yuchen Huang Portland State University orcid.org/0000-0001-8681-6112

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Yuchen Huang received her M.S.E.E. degree from Portland State University. She is the Director of ECE Digital IC Design Graduate Program Track at Portland State University. Her primary focus is on teaching. Prior to joining the ECE department at Portland State University, she was at Intel Corporation for 21 years in Hillsboro, Oregon, where she was a senior staff engineer, involved in key product development and industry adoption of technologies, standards, specifications and methodologies. She was the chairperson of cross-functional Joint Engineering Teams at Intel and industry consortium JEDEC DDR2 Memory Power Thermal Task Group, addressing system level memory power, thermal, and performance challenges. She has extensive experience in platform design, power management architecture and led the development of Intel’s Converged Platform Power Thermal Throttling Specification that maximizes re-usability across CPU generations and computing segments. She was the recipient of 20+ Intel Corporation awards for contributions to major product and industry initiatives. She is a member of ASEE.

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Branimir Pejcinovic Portland State University orcid.org/0000-0001-8574-5455

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Branimir Pejcinovic received his Ph.D. degree from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a Professor and former Associate Chair for Undergraduate Education at Portland State University, Electrical and Computer Engineering department. He has led department-wide changes in curriculum with emphasis on the project- and lab-based instruction and learning. He was awarded the best paper award by the ECE division of ASEE in 2017 for his work on freshman engineering course development. His research interests are in the areas of engineering education, microwave absorber design, ferroelectrics, photovoltaics, THz sensors, signal integrity, and semiconductor device characterization, design and simulation. He is a member of IEEE and ASEE.

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Abstract

Abstract While engineering schools have aspects of technical communication in their required coursework, most newly-hired engineers do not possess the communication skills to excel in industry. Making matters more complicated is the fact that many programs focus on teaching engineering fundamentals and leave “soft skills” to other departments. Given this environment, an approach tailored to engineering communication is needed to meet the unique requirements for engineers in industry.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) examine various forms of communication engineers must possess and their importance, and 2) describe the design, implementation, and assessment of a new senior-year ECE course which is specifically aimed at developing the critical communication skills for engineers in industry. For the first part we used a survey of managers and executives in a large high-tech company to determine the most important gaps. For the second part we use the following 5 lenses for technical communication:

Lens 1: Audience Type - Technical, Business, Customer Lens 2: Audience Seniority - Entry, Mid-Level, Executive Lens 3: Communication Form - Document, Verbal, Presentation Lens 4: Purpose - Educate/Inform, Influence/Sell, Request a Decision Lens 5: Length - 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 30 minutes

We start the course with the area engineers are most familiar with: Informing (lens 4) Entry level (lens 2) , Technical audiences (lens 1) in documents or presentations (lens 3) for 3 minutes (lens 5). We then build skills to make the transition to communicating and influencing business audiences. Lastly we make the most difficult transition to effectively influencing customers.

The course is delivered as though the students are engineers in industry and their assignments are based on common real-world communication tasks. They must summarize technical articles in short, written emails and present a short summary without notes (as though they were providing an update in a staff meeting). Critical to this course design is instructor/peer, real-time verbal feedback as well as video of all presentations for student self reflection. Longer form technical, executive and customer presentations are incorporated into the class with the students providing real-time feedback to their peers as though they were fellow employees in the company. Asking the students to provide positive and constructive feedback changes the dynamic of the audience from passive to active listeners and participants. Fun games are also used to introduce concepts such as analogies and illustrations to convey complex topics.

The effectiveness of our approach is confirmed by assessing the students’ assignment grades pre and post course which show significant improvement. Similarly, based on the student course evaluation data students rated highly the relevance and usefulness of this course. In the full paper we will provide full course implementation details and assessment data. We believe that with the skills they develop in this class, students will start their engineering careers well-prepared to progress upward professionally.

Preference is for a full conference session presentation.

Citation
Format

Garrison, T., & Huang, Y., & Pejcinovic, B. (2023, June), Design of an ECE Technical Communication Course for Accelerating Engineering Careers Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--42949

TY - CPAPER
AB - Abstract
While engineering schools have aspects of technical communication in their required coursework, most newly-hired engineers do not possess the communication skills to excel in industry. Making matters more complicated is the fact that many programs focus on teaching engineering fundamentals and leave “soft skills” to other departments. Given this environment, an approach tailored to engineering communication is needed to meet the unique requirements for engineers in industry.

The purpose of this paper is twofold:
1) examine various forms of communication engineers must possess and their importance, and 2) describe the design, implementation, and assessment of a new senior-year ECE course which is specifically aimed at developing the critical communication skills for engineers in industry.
For the first part we used a survey of managers and executives in a large high-tech company to determine the most important gaps. For the second part we use the following 5 lenses for technical communication:

Lens 1: Audience Type - Technical, Business, Customer
Lens 2: Audience Seniority - Entry, Mid-Level, Executive
Lens 3: Communication Form - Document, Verbal, Presentation
Lens 4: Purpose - Educate/Inform, Influence/Sell, Request a Decision
Lens 5: Length - 30 seconds, 3 minutes, 30 minutes

We start the course with the area engineers are most familiar with: Informing (lens 4) Entry level (lens 2) , Technical audiences (lens 1) in documents or presentations (lens 3) for 3 minutes (lens 5). We then build skills to make the transition to communicating and influencing business audiences. Lastly we make the most difficult transition to effectively influencing customers.

The course is delivered as though the students are engineers in industry and their assignments are based on common real-world communication tasks. They must summarize technical articles in short, written emails and present a short summary without notes (as though they were providing an update in a staff meeting). Critical to this course design is instructor/peer, real-time verbal feedback as well as video of all presentations for student self reflection. Longer form technical, executive and customer presentations are incorporated into the class with the students providing real-time feedback to their peers as though they were fellow employees in the company. Asking the students to provide positive and constructive feedback changes the dynamic of the audience from passive to active listeners and participants. Fun games are also used to introduce concepts such as analogies and illustrations to convey complex topics.

The effectiveness of our approach is confirmed by assessing the students’ assignment grades pre and post course which show significant improvement. Similarly, based on the student course evaluation data students rated highly the relevance and usefulness of this course. In the full paper we will provide full course implementation details and assessment data. We believe that with the skills they develop in this class, students will start their engineering careers well-prepared to progress upward professionally.

Preference is for a full conference session presentation.

AU - Thomas Garrison
AU - Yuchen Huang
AU - Branimir Pejcinovic
CY - Baltimore , Maryland
DA - 2023/06/25
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Design of an ECE Technical Communication Course for Accelerating Engineering Careers
UR - https://peer.asee.org/42949
DO - 10.18260/1-2--42949
ER -