2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Center for Infrastructure Transformation and Education (CIT-E) is a community of civil and environmental engineering faculty members representing more than 30 institutions interested in the scholarship of infrastructure education. CIT-E activities have evolved in a short period of time, starting with sharing materials from existing infrastructure courses at University X and the University of Y, to collaboratively creating sample “showcase” course lectures, to the current effort of collaboratively creating a model introductory infrastructure course.
The course outline and learning outcomes for a model introductory infrastructure course were collaboratively developed in 2015 by the CIT-E community. The student learning outcomes are:
1) An ability to analyze and propose solutions to infrastructure problems
2) An ability to describe and analyze infrastructure using systems and network approaches
3) An ability to identify traits of effective team members and apply these traits to course assignments
4) An ability to identify traits of effective spoken and written communication, and be able to apply these traits to make clear and compelling arguments
5) The desire to make a positive impact on the world, country, state, local levels and face infrastructure problems with an open-minded perspective
6) The ability to describe the influence of political, social, technological, environmental, and economic factors on infrastructure decisions
7) The ability to explain how infrastructure solutions affect society, the environment, and finances (i.e. the “triple bottom line”)
8) The ability to evaluate the condition of existing infrastructure and recommend improvements
9) The ability to define and describe the components of an infrastructure system and their functions
To meet these outcomes, a course outline was collaboratively created by CIT-E members. The course outline contains 43 lessons, and is divided into five modules: Fundamentals, One Water, Transportation, Energy, and Capstone.
The model course may be adopted in its entirety by future users; however, it is more likely that adopters will want to “pick and choose” from the available materials to suit their own department’s needs. Consequently, we have wanted to make sure that the model course is created to be as flexible as possible.
CIT-E members are currently creating the lessons for this model course, starting with the Fundamentals module. This module is perhaps the most important module; not only does it introduce students to infrastructure, but the materials from this module are integrated into lessons in the other modules. Each lesson is created by a team of CIT-E members, subjected to a peer review process, and then made available to adopters. The lessons were started by each team at the “Model Infrastructure Course Lesson Development Workshop” held in May 2015 at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville.
This paper will provide brief summaries and an overview of the process carried out to create the following lessons that comprise the Fundamentals module:

Lesson 1: What is infrastructure and why do we care?
Lesson 2: Basic infrastructure functions
Lesson 3: Systems/network analysis
Lesson 4: TBL/Sustainability
Lesson 5: Social impacts of infrastructure
Lesson 6: Teamwork
Lesson 7: Ethics I
Lesson 8: Ethics II
Lesson 9: Traits of effective written and oral communication
Lesson 10: Financing public works
Lesson 11: Safety/licensure
Lesson 12: Land use and planning/growth/forecasting
Lesson 13: Resilience and risk