Course Development in a First Year Engineering Program: The Interplay of Autonomy, Peer Relationships, and Content

While much is known about the student experience in large first year engineering programs, little is known about the experiences of the faculty engaged in teaching and course development. To begin closing this gap, we conducted a collective autoethnography to understand the faculty experience in executing course development in a large first year engineering program. Grounded in Self-Determination Theory, we focused on faculty motivation and addressed the research question: How does the interplay between faculty autonomy, course content, and departmental collegiality affect the course development process in a large first year engineering program? Individually, the participants reflected on a series of questions and then we engaged in collective data analysis. Our results show that autonomy plays an important but complex role in course development. Faculty who engaged in course development work on behalf of a larger team of instructors identified faculty autonomy as an important outcome of the course development work, i.e., they wanted faculty members to have room to teach in their own individually meaningful ways. At the same time, course developers confirmed that specifying common course subject content was a necessity in a common first year engineering course taught by multiple instructors. They recognized that this specificity curbed individual autonomy, resulting in a need for course developers to balance autonomy while maintaining collegiality when making content choices. Achieving balance is particularly challenging when collegiality is a departmental value that is enacted though not always articulated. Our findings advance the current knowledge base on faculty experiences in first year engineering programs and offer a number of practical implications.