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Creation of Open-Source Course Materials for Engineering Economics Course with Help from a Team of Students—Lessons Learned

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Engineering Economy Division (EED) Technical Session 1

Tagged Division

Engineering Economy Division (EED)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

9

DOI

10.18260/1-2--47090

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/47090

Download Count

21

Paper Authors

biography

Tamara R. Etmannski University of British Columbia Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-2036-631X

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Tamara Etmannski is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. Her position is focused on teaching content and various curricula and teaching and learning initiatives connected to 'impacts in engineering' (sustainability, leadership, economics, entrepreneurship). Her pedagogical interests include high-impact practices like active and experiential learning, team-projects and writing-based assignments, with special focus on learning through real-world applications

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Abstract

All engineering students in Canada must take an Engineering Economics course as part of program accreditation requirements. These courses mainly focus on the evaluation of monetary profits and direct financial costs incurred during the design, operation and decommissioning phases of projects. Instructors commonly use textbooks as the primary tool to guide the students through the content of this course, which tend cost around $100 US each student. Like many courses, the materials in this course does not change much over time resulting in many students opting to not buy the required textbook and instead rely on free sources of information found online, in older editions of textbooks or simply rely on course notes. The patchwork of sources creates problems in this course in particular, because of the variation of notation used across sources, which can easily cause confusion. It was this problem that inspired the creation of a set of open-source materials that students and instructors can use for free, enabling the instructor to have control over notation and concepts to focus on while saving the students money. This paper discusses the lessons learned during the creation of these materials, and in first-time use of these materials in a class of 200 fourth-year undergraduate civil engineering students, as well as dissemination challenges after the project ended.

Etmannski, T. R. (2024, June), Creation of Open-Source Course Materials for Engineering Economics Course with Help from a Team of Students—Lessons Learned Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--47090

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