Incoporating collaboration, communication and character into engineering education

The goal of KEEN’s Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM) framework is to incorporate learning that enhances students’ curiosity, connectedness of material, and creates value, which are expressed through collaboration, communication and character. The purpose of this paper is to describe KEEN’s Entrepreneurial Mindset, and demonstrate how to enact collaboration, communication and character within engineering courses. The methodology applied was to incorporate active learning within the classroom to encourage collaboration and enable students to become better communicators through Lean Six Sigma projects. Character was incorporated into an engineering economics course ethics materials, with real-world case studies related to ethics and values. Student-based assessments related to collaboration were implemented. Instructor-based assessments were implemented to assess the students’ communication skills within Lean Six Sigma project reports. Student-based pre and post ethics tests from the National Professional Engineers Society (NPES) were used to assess the students’ skills related to applying a professional code of conduct to real-world examples. Forty-one (41%) of the students had observed racial discrimination, 25% had observed gender discrimination and 20% had not observed any types of ethical dilemmas related to diversity and/or discrimination in their lives. The ethics module improved ethics learning related to identifying potential ethics violations by 17.9%, with a pretest average score of 3.0386 out of 5, compared to an improved average score post intervention of 3.5818, with a p-value on a paired t-test of ~0.000. The results were positive and demonstrated the application of EM related to collaboration, communication and character within engineering courses.