Summary of developments in the civil engineering capstone course in Taiwan

Institute of Engineering Education Taiwan (IEET) is the accreditation agency for engineering and technological education in Taiwan, and nearly all of the civil engineering programs in Taiwan have been accredited by IEET. As a Washington Accord signatory (WA), IEET accreditation system places much emphasis on graduate attributes; programs to be accredited must show evidence of graduates attributes that are consistent with their educational objectives. To align with the new requirements of the WA, IEET had a significant revision of the criteria, and starting from 2014, all programs to be accredited must have a Capstone Course and the program will have to use it as a way to provide evidence of the attainment of graduates attributes. Meanwhile, the Washington Accord also requires the students to be recognized are able to solve “complex engineering problems,” meaning the kind of engineering problems that may not have an obvious solution and may require the students to come up with a solution or possible solutions that take into consideration of a series of seemly conflict constrains. To comply with the WA graduate attributes, IEET has taken initiative to make Capstone Course a requirement in the accreditation criteria so that all students from accredited programs will deliver a Capstone project by graduation. To ease the transition, IEET requires the program to make Capstone Course a requirement starting from the entering class of 2014. Capstone project serves as an academic culminating experience for the students to integrate their learning in the program, namely the knowledge, skills and attitudes. While the Capstone Course may not be a required course in all programs now, most programs provide similar course or experience as electives. Considering the new mandates of the IEET accreditation criteria, programs are gearing up to modify their course requirements and/or course contents. Based on a preliminary study, IEET found a variety of structure of the course among the programs, and depending on the size and budget of the program, the contents of the Capstone Course could vary as well. In order to gain a better understanding of the developments of Capstone Course in the civil engineering departments, IEET sets out to conduct a survey to study the requirements, structure and assessment of the course. By conducting such a project, IEET hopes to have concrete information on the gap between the criteria requirements and the actual course offerings of the civil engineering programs. Meanwhile, the objective of the survey is to provide important references for programs as they go about modifying their curriculum. The contribution of this study will also shed lights on the development of such course in other disciplines. This paper provides a summary of the survey findings and possibly also the feedbacks from the civil engineering education community in Taiwan.