In this proposed departmental revolution, the Bioengineering Department at the University of Illinois is aligning its undergraduate curriculum with medical practice and education by designing the curriculum around a simple message, "no solution without a need." The rising cost of healthcare, the increased role of technology in medicine, and emerging ethical dilemmas created by an increasing and aging population require that all bioengineers and healthcare providers understand the social and ethical context of their work to derive solutions that can meet these complex needs. However, students are typically isolated from these social contexts during their technical training, limiting their ability to identify and understand the needs of society and healthcare providers. Consequently, these students are limited in their ability to derive optimal engineering or technological solutions. The Bioengineering curriculum is being changed to achieve four objectives: 1) redesign the curriculum so that societal needs for healthcare and medicine drive the technical content, 2) integrate out-of-class experiences so that students receive hands-on practice with identifying and understanding societal and healthcare provider needs, 3) translate medical assessment practices to align clinical experiences with the curriculum, and 4) develop faculty teaching skills to meet these new challenges by engaging their intrinsic motivations to revolutionize the department. This revolution is driven locally by the creation and launch of the first Engineering-Based College of Medicine in the nation in fall 2018 that will integrate instruction in engineering with clinical and biological sciences.
Catalyzed by the Grinter Report, engineering education was previously revolutionized by aligning its practice and education with science. This alignment created a social-technical duality in engineering where the technical skills were elevated and social skills were relegated. In response, calls have risen for holistic training of engineering students who understand the societal needs and the societal implications of their practice. This change can be accomplished by aligning sub-disciplines of engineering with other holistic disciplines. The next revolution in bioengineering education can be brokered by realigning with healthcare and medicine - areas of impact and practice that holistically integrate social and technical aspects. This revised curriculum integrates clinical experiences that provide a context for students to learn ethnographic methods for user-oriented needs identification and problem scoping. While traditional curricula organize courses by their technical content, the new curriculum organizes courses by the needs that the curriculum will empower students to solve. Needs such as age-related disease, global health, and cancer provide the starting point for students who are navigating their curriculum. The use of new assessment tools such as competency-based models and e-portfolios integrate these new curricular tracks with the clinical experiences. Finally, to help faculty learn how to execute this new curriculum, the Bioengineering faculty are organized into Communities of Practice to execute course and assessment revisions. This process is driven by departmental administration who are guided and supported by organizational change researchers. This revolution is being spread beyond the Illinois campus through accreditation agencies and technical societies.
