Undergraduate Student Learning Initiative

The guiding principles of curriculum development in BioE are defined in our workload policy as follows: “The Department of Bioengineering will expand the knowledge base in bioengineering through teaching and cross-disciplinary research. Department faculty will be encouraged to develop and teach a modern bioengineering curriculum, to provide hands-on research opportunities for students, and to provide one-on-one mentor advising to ensure that students select the best combination of coursework to meet their academic goals.”

Since our founding in 1998, the BioE faculty have been working to create an integrated, comprehensive program. Much thought has been put into the question: “what does every bioengineer need to know?” The faculty have been engaged in considerable dialog over the years about what needs to be included, in what order, and how to do so in a reasonable time frame. Balancing depth with breadth has been the key challenge, and we have now reached a turning point where the pieces are coming together to form a coherent bioengineering discipline.

Evolution of the Bioengineering Curriculum

The bioengineering curriculum originally implemented in 1999 evolved directly from the Engineering Science bioengineering program and had to draw exclusively on courses offered by other units. Although newly devised bioengineering courses were subsequently added to the already lengthy list of approved electives, there was no obvious structural framework for the curriculum. Students faced a dizzying array of elective options, with no measurable benchmarks for achieving sufficient depth in any core area. Motivated by the problematic framework, a comprehensive report from an adhoc undergraduate student committee, and a College of Engineering push for a common first year, the bioengineering faculty completed a major overhaul of bioengineering undergraduate degree requirements. The resulting program, approved by the COE faculty in fall 2006, includes clearly articulated concentrations in biomaterials, biomechanics, biomedical devices, cell and tissue engineering, computational bioengineering, and imaging, as well as a pre-med option.

The concentrations are unified by a bioengineering core that includes courses (termed bioengineering fundamentals) covering key topics such as biomechanics, biological transport, bioinstrumentation, biomedical physiology and computational biology. The development of senior level electives has likewise been aimed at defining the discipline of bioengineering, including the specialized coursework necessary to educate leaders in this rapidly evolving field.

Undergraduate Major Requirements

All students complete lower division coursework in math, chemistry, physics, and computer science. The recent addition of BioE 10 to the freshman year, which exposes students to human physiology fundamentals with an emphasis on the integration of engineering applications to biology and health , provides a context for all subsequent coursework. Students also take two seminar courses with weekly lectures on a variety of topics in bioengineering. The sophomore year adds depth in math and science, and students begin taking courses to prepare them for their major upper division coursework. See Table 1 for a summary of lower division requirements.

The junior year includes the selection of at least two bioengineering fundamentals courses, plus a number of technical electives in engineering, math, statistics and the physical and biological sciences. The senior year includes advanced coursework in bioengineering and related topics, at least one bioengineering laboratory course, as well as capstone design and/or research. Table 2 lists the core major requirements. The Concentrations (Table 3) were developed to help students navigate toward their desired area of specialization, and provides a roadmap through the senior year. Enterprising students may chart their own course under the guidance of a faculty adviser, provided it meets all the general program requirements.

Undergraduate Student Learning Initiative

Program Documentation

1. What would you like your majors to know or be able to do by the time they graduate?

2. What is the relationship between the program level goals you have identified and your existing core curriculum?

Table 4 maps our program level goals to specific elements in the bioengineering curriculum. Our courses have been specifically designed to deliver these learning outcomes.

3. How will you communicate information about your learning goals to your majors and potential majors?

Course specific learning outcomes will be detailed on all course syllabi, which are distributed in class and available on the course’s website, generally in bSpace. Our department website will serve as the primary tool for communication about broader program goals, as it now serves as the most frequently utilized resource for curriculum information. Our learning goals are also communicated to students and prospective students through outreach materials and events, such as at Cal Day, video and phone chats for admitted students, department brochures, newsletters and annual reports, and welcome packets mailed to admits. Goals for our students are further communicated through example at the regular poster sessions and departmental awards to students, and by published profiles of successful alumni.

4. How will you assess your major’s attainment of these goals? What would it take to make the implementation of these goals fully successful?

Assessment

Bioengineering uses performance on examinations and assignments as a measure of student comprehension of key concepts. We plan to work with other departments in the College of Engineering who have developed software tools to use exam performance to measure course specific outcomes as part of the ABET accreditation process.

Opportunities for research or hands-on learning are also frequently integrated into our courses, which may include a graded poster or project. A common thread is to emphasize the practical applications of the knowledge base and inspire students to apply these principles beyond the classroom. Many courses include design challenges, some of which have blossomed into viable design prototypes. In addition practical outcomes such as these, projects and presentations enable the instructor to gauge the extent to which students have acquired relevant knowledge and practical skills related to course specific and program goals.

The design captstone class (BioE 192), supervised independent research (BioE H194) and/or design project (BioE 196), required of all bioengineering students, are the ideal vehicles for students to demonstrate all the desired learning outcomes. Research and design projects draw on acquired knowledge of engineering principles and methods and the physical, chemical and mathematical basis of biology. Students are expected identify projects at multiple biological scales and apply engineering concepts to a biological system or a bioengineering problem of technical or societal significance. The experience often involves working in teams and successful project completion relies on effective communication skills, the ability to analyze and interpret data, and competency in experimental design and/or device prototype development. These skills are demonstrated in the execution of the project itself and also in a poster presentation hosted regularly by the department. Projects may emerge from a design challenge posed in a senior bioengineering elective course, as described above, and can culminate in a functional design prototype or scientific publication. In this manner, many of our undergraduates not only demonstrate advanced knowledge in a specialized field of bioengineering, but contribute to its advancement.

We also utilize a number of survey tools which enable students to self report their own assessment of their undergraduate experience. The campus administers the UCUES survey and we recently developed an Alumni questionnaire for graduating bioengineering students. We also use SurveyMonkey for mid-term assessments and engage our students to critique the delivery of the BioE curriculum and offer feedback and recommendations. The major curriculum overhaul we recently implemented was informed in large part by a report from an ad hoc student group and accompanying survey.

Challenges: Curriculum development in a lean environment

Bioengineering is a dynamic and fast-growing interdisciplinary field where innovation in teaching is the norm. Educational materials in many areas of bioengineering, especially at the undergraduate level, have not been well developed. There is usually no textbook available, nor well-organized existing curricula, which means that our faculty have to prepare their own pedagogical guides, online resources, even write their own textbooks.

Our faculty have been both creative and resourceful in their approach to developing curricula. An excellent example is demonstrated by Associate Professor Dan Fletcher, who pursued and received two grants to improve his BioE 164 Optics and Microscopy course. The National Instruments Foundation and National Instruments, Inc donated money and equipment in support of developing laboratory modules for a microscopy lab series. And, he received funding through the College of Engineering Classroom Technology Program to support a unique study of antique optics. His students analyzed, for the first time, the working condition of four vintage instruments, important specimens from the Golub Collection of historic microscopes. Despite their historical importance, little modern analysis has been made of their optical design, imaging capability, or what scientists could have seen through them centuries ago. The purpose was not only to determine functionality, but also to analyze design, collect magnified images, and learn about the physics of optics and the history of instrumentation. The exercise was an overwhelming success not only with students, but with philanthropist Orville Golub, who was so pleased with how his collection is being used that he donated additional microscopes to the campus.

Many, if not all, of our faculty use online sites such as bSpace to deliver course materials to their students, and some are experimenting further with online resources. Lecturer Terry Johnson has been undertaking a major project to improve laboratory and course protocols using online video (for example, http://tdj.berkeley.googlepages.com/sds-page). Students are able to see parts of experiments that are difficult to explain in text, and to review those experiments after they leave the class and move on to their own bench research. As openly available resources, these can be consulted by other researchers around the world and by students after they have finished the course. Another faculty member is exploring the idea of requiring students to take a virtual pre-lab (played like a video game) which the student has to pass before being allowed to conduct a lab experiment.

The commitment our faculty have shown to the teaching mission is remarkable. Where resources were not available, faculty sought them, either through soliciting private gifts, campus grants, or leveraging barely known and underutilized campus resources. They have devoted long hours to developing instructional materials, pedagogical guides, and online resources, while simultaneously launching ambitious research programs. This dedication to building a solid instructional infrastructure for undergraduates is unparalleled in my experience. Our faculty deserve the highest praise for their contributions to the university and its fundamental mission.

Future plans

Our junior and senior course offerings are structured around our research thrust areas, which provides students access to cutting-edge knowledge in bioengineering. Since it is this generation of students who are likely to fully define the field, perhaps more so even than ourselves, we view our students as partners in the development of the curriculum. This is a labor intensive approach. Rather than offering a few large courses, we offer many smaller courses. Highly specialized senior courses do not have high enrollments. This means more teaching effort for less allocated student FTE.

The emphasis on teaching in the upper division also limits our students’ exposure to bioengineering in the first two years. Ultimately, we hope to remedy this by developing an introductory bioengineering series which emphasizes key biological terms and concepts through the lenses of engineering, computation, physics and mathematics. Such a series would reduce course compression in the lower division by replacing existing requirements in chemistry, biology and physics, and would allow students to initiate core bioengineering coursework perhaps as early as the sophomore year. This would serve our students as well as students in other engineering programs who seek to learn some biology fundamentals, but are not able to take existing biology courses because there are too many prerequisites. A bioengineering course sequence in the lower division could come to serve the college in the same way that lower division computer science has been integrated into the core engineering curriculum for all majors.

Lower division bioengineering courses would further serve our students by cementing a common culture and providing the intellectual framework necessary for our interdisciplinary field. It would also better prepare students to choose their specialization track in their junior year. We envision each bioengineering course using recurring and ever deepening examples from biology with a focus on control and design of these systems. These would be large courses, and would be demanding to teach; we presently lack the faculty depth and TAS resources for such an undertaking.

The major obstacle to full implementation of a robust curriculum in bioengineering is our limited faculty resources: our 16 FTE serve an undergraduate population which well exceeds 400. Furthermore, we cannot mandate course requirements if we cannot effectively deliver the courses on a frequent basis. Thus many courses that we view to be core must be treated as electives until we have adequate faculty depth to offer each course once or more per year, after accounting for sabbatical and other leaves. Our curriculum plans therefore are dependent on increasing the size of the faculty. We will be able to fully develop the bioengineering curriculum when our faculty FTE is better aligned with our student enrollment.

One notable example from BioE 164 “Optics and Microscopy” involved a class assignment where students were invited to submit designs on paper for turning the camera in a cell phone into a portable microscope. A team of undergraduates became highly engaged, and with the help of a bioengineering graduate student, launched the CellScope project. The team began work on a prototype device with i nitial funding from UC Berkeley’s Big Ideas fund, then tied for first place in the CITRIS IT for Society contest. They have since secured additional funds to enable further project development.