Towards scalable clinical immersion experiences for engineering students

Identifying needs and constraints is essential to the engineering design process. An effective and widely used pedagogical strategy for teaching this aspect of design in biomedical engineering (BME) is clinical experiences. Clinical experiences at the bachelor's through doctoral levels are a common feature of BME programs that are consistently ranked among the best in the country. Until recently, our institution did not have the infrastructure, especially a medical school, that is a necessary prerequisite for engaging engineering students in clinical experiences. Spring 2021 will be the pilot offering of our new clinical immersion course. Our pilot, like clinical immersion experiences offered at other institutions, is limited to a small number of carefully selected students. However, our long-term goal is to provide clinical immersion experiences for engineering students on the scale needed at our large public university. The purpose of this presentation is to share our experiences in designing a pilot offering of a clinical immersion course with an emphasis on an evaluation framework that will help us tease apart the contributions of the different aspects of the course to student learning. Such an understanding will be critical to identify efficient approaches for future offerings to make clinical experiences accessible to a large number of engineering students at all educational levels (bachelors, integrated bachelors/masters, masters, and doctoral).