Lessons Learned through the Development of an Undergraduate Course on Civil Engineering Failures

A new undergraduate course was developed to introduce civil engineering students to the field of forensic engineering and foster an awareness of how engineers can and should learn from failures. Several other individuals and engineering departments have made commendable efforts to integrate information about specific failure cases within civil engineering courses while others have developed graduate-level courses designed to teach the students to become forensic engineers. This undergraduate course was designed to fit somewhere in between. The goals were two-fold: to improve the general knowledge base of historic and common failure modes and to introduce the field of forensic engineering and what it requires in an effort to encourage continued education in the field. The development of such a course was difficult for a number of reasons including the vast scope of the field, the scarce supply of teaching materials, and the disparity between the level of student knowledge at an undergraduate level and that required to fully understand an engineering failure. This paper describes the educational objectives and resources utilized in the preparation of the course, the variety of teaching methods and techniques undertaken during the course of the semester, and the successful components of the course as well as the difficulties and challenges encountered. Several considerations and suggestions are presented for others in the development of similar courses and recommendations for improving future offerings of this course are also presented.