Degree programme initiative: Materials Redesigned BSc 2020

We propose to develop a modern curriculum that will educate the materials scientists/engineers to meet the professional demands of tomorrow by enabling our graduates to solve emerging problems in our evolving technological, social, and cultural environment.

This will be achieved by strengthening the engineering and design components while retaining the scientific rigor, opening free spaces for the lecturers as well as for the students to introduce new integrative teaching and learning methods, and enhancing the visibility and profile of our program, and creating a unique profile compared with other leading Universities, to enable recruitment of the best students in Switzerland and world-wide.
 
The first planning phase focusses on the central structural decisions: the qualification profile, the structure, and the learning units of the new curriculum. The second implementation phase is dedicated to the implementation of these decisions in terms of the content, and teaching and assessment techniques.

• Professional help with structuring the project management.
• Engagement of all interested parties at every stage.
• Communication of developments and adaptation based on feedback.
• Feedback from students and from Alumni sounding board.
• Excellent staff support.

The DMATL BSc curriculum is now restructured in two key ways:
1) Many of the core competencies are acquired through projects that increase in length and complexity with the progress of the studies. We start with short and guided projects, which become increasingly open-ended as the studies progress. This project-based learning is quite new to our curriculum.
2) Key concepts are taught integratively rather than according to the traditional materials classes. This is a contemporary approach for the teaching of Materials Science that starts to become more widely adopted worldwide.

We think that the process worked very smoothly. Assessment of the curriculum, where I am sure that we will find many areas for improvement, is not yet complete.

Our current students and alumni were engaged in the curriculum development process and their opinions helped shape the new curriculum. Based on their enthusiasm for engagement, we have included three students in the core project team for our newly started MSc revision project. Collection of feedback from the new cohort of BSc students, who are the first to study in the new curriculum, is ongoing.

We hired a professional management coach to help us structure the project management at the beginning of the project. This was invaluable for me as I had no experience in structuring or managing such a project.