Creating corporate world experience in capstone courses

Many engineering capstone courses require senior design projects involving teamwork. The curricula at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Donaghey CyberCollege engages local industries in providing meaningful design projects for student teams in real world settings. Both St.Vincent Health System and Heifer International sponsored capstone design teams in yearlong projects. These projects resulted in the students gaining professional skills, the industries gaining products that saved money and won awards, and the CyberCollege faculty gaining understanding and experience for developing its engineering curricula. Engineering educators who want to provide real-world experience to graduating seniors may benefit from learning how we obtained corporate sponsors for the projects, created student-consulting teams, and developed a capstone course incorporating system design theory. They may also gain insight from discussions about our methods for student evaluations and about the lessons we learned from our experimental capstone course.