This research-to-practice full paper studies the different approaches to curriculum development in both Engineering and Humanities courses and explores how the role of having an integrated narrative structure in the Personal Communication course for undergraduates impacts student learning. The Personal Communication course offered to engineering students in the undergraduate program is part of the larger interdisciplinary initiative of a technology university to develop engineering graduates with a strong social presence and effective communication skills. This course has been taught using different pedagogies to two different batches of engineering students. For the control group (first batch, semester 4), the course was taught by focusing on various personal communication capacities and skills independent of each other. Each capacity, for example, empathy, was taken as an end in itself and skills required to acquire empathy were taught. Five capacities in all were taught (Intentionality, Relationality, Empathy, Articulation, and Composition). However, for the experiment group (second batch, semester 2) a new pedagogy was devised which was based on the premise that if these capacities are conceptually linked and cumulatively built through a narrative structure over the course then, engineers will be less apathetic to learning a non-technical communication course. Resnik's 4P framework was employed as the foundation for the curriculum development of the Personal Communication course. While Resnik's 4P framework has previously been utilized in the educational journey of K-12 students, its application within a university context has never been done. This research on our innovative curriculum design, inspired by Resnik's framework, argues that the narrative strength of Resnik's 4P framework offers an inherent coherence and internal rationality to the Personal Communication course. This, in turn, positively influences student learning outcomes, thus marking a pivotal advancement in the field of educational methodology. This study uses a between-subjects research design and gathers data from engineering students, by looking at their course performance. Additionally, it also uses a 5-point Likert Scale and a subjective questionnaire to assess student perception of course curriculum and its impact on teaching personal communication capacities.

This innovative practice full paper explores the significance of theatre as a pedagogical tool in teaching personal communication courses to engineering students. Teaching non-technical subj ects, such as humanities and communication courses, to engineering students has been a momentous challenge. This is due in part to the perception that these subjects are not directly related to the technical nature of the field of engineering studies. Furthermore, these courses are perceived to be irrelevant to the practical applications of technology and engineering in the real world. Engineering students prefer hands-on, practical, and experimental projects that directly correlate with their technical field of study. Therefore, instructional methods and pedagogies play a pivotal role in shaping engineering students' learning, especially of humanities and communication courses. Personal communication courses in the past have been primarily delivered through lectures on communication theories and a few classroom experiences delivered through activities. However, in an effort to enhance the learning efficacy, we chose to use theatrical formats and exercises as a pedagogical tool to teach personal communication capacities and skills. This unconventional approach allowed us to bring the dynamism of real-life communication scenarios into the classroom. The theatre exercises were adopted from the work of Augusto Boal and Konstantin Stanislavsky and were used in two ways: 1. Physical theatre exercises which involved body work and movement-based exercises. 2. Theatre-based communication activities, which involved group activities based around various roles and characters, in case-study scenarios. The theatre activities, specifically tailored for practicing personal communication skills, provided students with a platform to simulate real-life experiences within the safe confines of a classroom, thereby providing them with a unique opportunity to exercise their communication skills in a practical context. Our research included control and experimental groups, with the latter having the Theater-Oriented Pedagogy (TOP) integrated into their curriculum. The data analysis revealed a higher learning performance in personal communication skills among the experimental group. Additionally, students preferred communicative theatre exercises in comparison to physical theatre exercises. This paper, therefore, argues that the learning performance of personal communication skills significantly improves when the theatrical format is employed as an instructional method for engineering students.

This full research paper seeks to understand the self-efficacy of engineering students in a research communication course. Grounding our investigation into Bandura's assertion that personal beliefs about one's effectiveness are pivotal for motivating actions, we hypothesize that students' self-efficacy and their positive perceptions of their abilities are crucial for enhancing their learning experiences. Self-efficacy in general is a well-researched area in undergraduate education but there are very few studies that focus on research self-efficacy of undergraduate engineering students. This study was conducted in an undergraduate-level engineering classroom at an Engineering University located in India. The goal of this research was to assess the research self-efficacy of students enrolled in a research communication course. A multi-methods approach was used to assess the self-efficacy development of 77 students. A pre-post 5-point Likert Scale survey was used to collect the quantitative data and the results of the analysis revealed that students showed a statistically significant gain in research self-efficacy from pre to post test, suggesting that the course effectively improved the research self-efficacy levels of the students. The qualitative data was collected using an open-response tool. The responses were analyzed using thematic analysis; the results highlighted that the students expressed the need for mentorship and guidance on research. The students also showed eagerness and a positive attitude to learning research techniques. Further, the post-survey questions were analyzed, and the analysis revealed that upon completion of the course, students felt competent in conducting literature reviews. They also felt more confident in framing the research problems, writing academic papers, and doing presentations. This improvement illustrates the impact of the course in improving research self-efficacy and also in equipping students with skills crucial for academic and professional success. However, some students also expressed challenges with designing their research methodology sections. This indicates the areas where further support and instructional focus could be beneficial. Overall, the findings of the study highlight the course's success in enhancing students' research self-efficacy and skills, while also pointing to the necessity of continuous support and targeted instruction to address identified challenges.

This innovative practice full paper seeks to gauge the significance of using a transdisciplinary approach in designing a personal communication course for engineering students. The design of a humanities or a communication course is critically important when delivered to engineering students as these courses contain non-technical subject knowledge which is not a part of the regular engineering curriculum. Therefore, while conventional course design structures, typically composed of lectures, quizzes, lab work and examinations, have shown to be efficient methods for teaching core engineering courses, these same conventional course designs become ineffective for teaching communication courses in an engineering context. This research, based upon a course design innovation shows that the context provided by the core engineering course offered a meaningful and valuable environment for the practical application of personal communication course outputs. This research was conducted on a personal communication course taught to first-year engineering students. This course was redesigned through an interdisciplinary collaboration with the Programming Data Structures (PDS) course. The critical skills associated with personal communication were instructed and practised in the context of the PDS course project, as the PDS course, by design, is centred around a team-based project. However, traditionally the PDS course does not provide training on how to effectively build and communicate within a team to realize the objectives of its student projects which are always done by a team of students. Thus, the personal communication and PDS courses were able to complement one another with each one providing context for learning in the other respectively. This study uses a repeated measures research design and gathers data from 104 students using their class performance to gauge their learning efficacy and a survey that used both a subjective and objective questionnaire in which the students’ perceptions of the value of transdisciplinary course design was gauged after undertaking the course. The course was taught in two parts, each culminating in a project. The first part (control group) project was done without any transdisciplinary collaboration. The second project (experiment group) had a transdisciplinary collaboration with the PDS project. The data shows that for the students, the context provided by the PDS course project offered a meaningful and valuable environment for the practical application of personal communication course outputs. Additionally, student performance data reveals that the experiment group, with collaborative design, performed better than the control group. This shows that when communication courses take on a transdisciplinary design by collaborating with another core engineering course in this case with PDS, it increases the efficacy of learning communication courses for engineering students.

This research-to-practice WIP paper presents a multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) system that assesses speech proficiency especially tuned for conversations on technical subjects particularly on the theme of AI. Critical thinking and clear communication skills are as important as technical career-specific skills. Automated speech proficiency tools only test for English speaking skills. However, the assessment of domain-specific technical communication skills is of utmost importance. The objective of this paper is to introduce an AI system for automated assessment of technical communication competency by providing an assessment for anyone desiring to converse on the theme of AI. The following three steps outline the approach followed in this paper. First, a multi-modal AI system has been designed by bringing together three pre-trained machine learning models each specializing in one domain related to speech proficiency estimation. Second, the multi-modal AI system is used to assess competence in proficiency of language communication in the context of technical conversations which particularly include: 1) content relevance 2) grammatical correctness, and 3) fluency of speech. Third, insights drawn from the multimodal system are compared to the speaker's self-perception of their proficiency. The uniqueness of our AI system is that it is able to combine the insights from these three models together towards a holistic speech proficiency analysis, especially for the technological domain. We validate the performance of our AI system under a controlled setting at a technological university. Our experiments led us to make the following discoveries about the use of our AI system to assess technical speech proficiency: 1) our AI system correctly analyzes that participants exhibit higher speech proficiency on topics in their domain of expertise, 2) grammatical correctness of speech remains unaffected when testing participants on topics with varied familiarity, and 3) participants' self-perception of their knowledge of various topics aligns with their ability to speak on the topic as measured by our AI system. We propose that our AI system would provide anyone interested in conversing proficiently on technological themes, especially AI, with the necessary tools to self-assess and track their progress.

There has been increasing evidence of the long-term benefit of a learner-centered model of pedagogy, in which students are introduced to perspectives outside of school, allowing for more in-depth discussion and exploration of topics and creating meaningful learning opportunities. There is an understandable assumption that increased exposure to the field in which students are training will afford greater insight to the problem-solving challenges they will face in the work force. However, the affordances this methodology provides for engineering students working with corporations and new technologies is complicated by issues of security, intellectual property, and privacy issues. This work in progress paper will describe the student outcomes and the effect of generating an experiential approach to communicating and addressing complex ethical problems, and arriving at transdisciplinary solutions.