Engineering curricula at the University of Saskatchewan: eight programs with a common core

Abstract

Engineering curriculum design at the University of Saskatchewan presents the universal challenge of providing a program of studies that develops technical excellence in mathematics, science, and engineering synthesis together with the breadth of knowledge, social awareness, ethics and humanitarian studies needed by today's engineers. The College of Engineering also faces special challenges since it must offer studies in a number of engineering disciplines and also serve a constituent base of students from a provincial population that is relatively small. As part of the solution to the problems associated with limited resources distributed over eight rather wide ranging programs, a common core of courses for all engineering programs has been utilized. By stressing the common core nature of many engineering courses, curricula were developed which should cause no major teaching-related disruptions within the college. For theses curricula, the contents of many courses has been modified and course responsibilities have been shifted from the general program to departmental programs. Also, a number of courses have been dropped and there are a number of new courses.<>