Academic Needs Assessment to Inform Course and Program Design: A Hybrid Vehicle Engineering Program as a Case Study

摘要

Establishing the overarching learning objectives for an engineering program can be daunting. There are a suite of studies that have performed surveys to derive course learning objectives, but this aspect of the course design and assessment process is perhaps underappreciated in the education literature, and is more certainly uncommon in the automotive engineering education literature [2-7]. Creating these objectives is also challenging as various educational philosophies, interests, and perspectives are frequently present. For example, some believe that academia's main purpose is higher learning, while others posit that job placement is the major focus. Such differences can lead to a variety of distinct learning objectives, which in turn lead to very different academic curricula. Therefore, it is essential to first consider such purposes and then carefully tune the program objectives to said purposes, and to have guidance with writing the objectives themselves.