Integrated Project: An Innovative Way To Reduce Students' Burden And Enhance Soft Skills And Integration Elements

摘要

Outcome based education demands new challenging innovations in engineering education for students to be able to relate the theories obtained from traditional lectures with some practical applications with real world. Moreover, most students prone to see every course taught within one semester as a separate subject without having connection of each other. In order to overcome these students' weaknesses, the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, UKM since 2006/2007 session has applied an innovative approach, known as Integrated Project. Integrated project (IP) is a group project that is designed to integrate all the departmental courses at each semester. For this project, students at each semester have to perform only one single project that caters all the requirement of the three or four courses within each semester. This approach does clearly reduce the students' burden instead of having to perform a dedicated project for each of the subjects. Additionally, the students have the opportunity to enhance their soft skills such as written and oral communication, long life learning to obtain updated data and information and also, identify current issues and team work. Since it was firstly implemented in 2006/2007, there were already three batches of students that have successfully completed the cycle of integrated project throughout their study from second year until final year. Surveys were conducted in order to get feedbacks from the students on the integrated project implementation. From the results, almost all students gave satisfactory remarks and comments on the implementation of the integrated project. They felt that this IP had assisted them a lot in completing their final design project and proposed it to be continued in future.