Communication Webinars for Engineering Professionals
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Project Background
Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering has an online master’s program that offers technical degrees in subjects like biotechnology and computer systems, but they don’t currently offer any classes in technical communication to support their degree programs. This gap in communication coursework has become a problem for students because, increasingly, employers want to hire engineers who are both strong engineers and strong communicators – and students have never acquired those communication skills.
I work with this population of students regularly through other classes I teach within Hopkins, and when I have interviewed them about the poor writing in their papers, they agree that: 1.) They really don’t know how to write clearly and directly, and, beyond grade school grammar, no one has introduced them to any strategies or techniques to help them improve their sentence-level writing. 2.) They haven’t been exposed to examples of well-written engineering papers, so they don’t have a standard to which they can hold themselves. 3.) They don’t have regular practice thinking about how an audience would interpret their words.
This webinar series is designed to introduce learners to basic strategies for clearer writing in technical documents. In each talk, I present examples of well-written technical reports and analyse what makes them effective. It also gives students some opportunity to practice identifying examples of clear writing, as well as opportunities to practice some basic revision strategies.
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Stories to Engage a Technical Audience
Teaching writing to engineering professionals can be tough because, for many, the topic feels removed from the daily concerns of their jobs. Many of these learners don't read much, and for most, what they learned about writing in college through literary studies does not easily connect to what they now do. To help them make the connection more easily, I use stories of famous technical communication blunders to help learners see how writing can have a serious impact in a technical setting. Bad writing can cost a company billions of dollars – and, in the worst cases, bad writing can cost human lives. Over the course of the hour I show learners exactly how these miscommunications occurred, ultimately asking them to help me envision how these events could have gone differently, sentence by sentence. Recent webinar themes/cases have included the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion, and General Motor’s famous mishandling of the ignition switch design in the Chevy Cobalt.
Interactive Elements Give Opportunity for Practice
The webinars are run through Zoom and I used the interactive polling feature to help participants engage with the material. Early in the session, I pose multiple choice questions to get students to think about writing in the context of their daily lives and to see how their experiences compare to their peers. Later on in the session, after I've demonstrated principles of writing through examples, I use questions as knowledge checks to help participants practice what they've learned and receive some feedback. I also encourage students to use the chat feature at various points throughout the webinar to ask questions and give more complex responses to questions I pose. Though the webinar is not currently required by any degree program, the series has still been quite popular: over 150 students have registered for each session. Survey results indicate that students find the content helpful and the interactive format thought-provoking. My administrators are hoping to use these survey results to build support for a full 13-week course in technical communication.
Slide design: my work.
Instructional design: also my work.
Instructional lead: I led the webinar, supported by some very sharp instructional technologists who ran technical support.
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