Implementation of a Standalone, Industry-centered Technical Communications Course in a Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Program

Abstract The ability to communicate technical information in written, graphical, and verbal formats is an essential durable skill for engineering students to develop as undergraduates and carry forward into the workplace. Employers have highlighted recent graduates' inability to formulate tight, cohesive arguments for their engineering decisions, as well as difficulties adjusting their communication style for different audiences. Even though accreditation outcomes now explicitly include durable skills, such as "an ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences," prior research suggests that the field is still far from meeting industry expectations for proficiency in the varying modalities and styles of workplace communication. Laboratory courses are frequently relied upon to teach or reinforce writing and presentation skills. There are two major issues with this approach. First, in lab classes, the communication method is typically narrowly focused on reports that simulate writing for hypothesis-driven research projects, which fail to align with the design-based and project management aspects of professional engineering workloads. Second, lab courses that heavily emphasize technical communications frequently do so at the expense of technical knowledge, that is, the engineering concepts involved with the laboratory experiment. Many students already view communication skills as "soft" in comparison to technical knowledge; and this attitude affects their performance and retention. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a stand-alone technical communications course that was specifically created for first-year mechanical engineering students and centered on multiple, industry-aligned modalities of communication. There are two major writing assignments in the course, both of which are open-ended "technical briefs" that involve background research, data analysis, and justification of an engineering decision for a design firm. For these major assignments, students individually submit a draft and receive detailed feedback for improvement before submitting the final versions. These two major assignments are scaffolded with weekly individual assignments that give students experience with a range of communication skills and modalities, e.g., using a reference manager and composing professional emails. To gauge the effectiveness of this stand-alone course in improving students' technical communication skills, we conducted pre- and post-course surveys of all students enrolled in the course in 2023 (n=147), and we also tracked improvements in technical writing from draft to final form via established rubrics. Students demonstrated gains in self-efficacy for nearly all technical communication skills covered in the course as well as improved self-efficacy in different communication modalities, e.g., email, slide presentations, and executive summaries. The results of this evaluation suggest that a stand-alone, industry-centered technical communications course builds student competency with communication strategies used in the workplace. Future work will focus on whether students are able to transfer these skills into latter courses and ultimately their careers.