A faculty experience on evolving an engineering curriculum with project based learning as co-educational strategy

The usual way of integrating Project Based Learning in Engineering Education is to place a capstone design project in the curriculum in the final year of Engineering. The faculty at Chitkara University showed that the positive effects of PBL are too good to be left behind for the students to experience at the end of their four year UG studies. The PBL was placed as co-educational-strategy and was integrated in the curriculum in all the four years of UG engineering learning experience by introducing “Integrated Projects” as a credit course. The faculty was aware that the positive effects of Project and Problem based Learning on students´ knowledge and skill gain in engineering have been established many a times in many studies and by actual implementation. The challenge was to integrate them in curriculum so that the participation by students and faculty is compulsory instead of voluntary. This paper describes a faculty experience - recognition of an opportunity, the challenges faced during design and during integration of PBL in engineering curriculum at UG level in Engineering Education.