ENGRC 3027 - Cross-cultural Communications and Ethics in the Workplace

Fall, Spring. 1 credit. Letter grades only.

Enrollment limited to: EN and BEE seniors or permission of instructor. Satisfies the College of Engineering’s engineering communication requirement.

H. Wang.

Engineering industries increasingly demand individual contributors and teams that can communicate and collaborate with professionals across diverse cultures. The purpose of this course is to increase students’ cultural awareness and sensitivity and develop intercultural competence while engaging positively in technical work. Course topics will focus on engineering communication and practices of human-centered design, thereby exposing cultural dimensions and ethical consequences of human-engineered artifacts. Through various kinds of genre writing practice and a major teamwork project, students are expected to improve written, oral, visual and interpersonal communication skills as well.

Outcome 1: Demonstrate cultural awareness and sensitivity and adapt themselves to audiences from other cultures in both written, visual and oral communication.

Outcome 2: Demonstrate ethical awareness in technology design/development and create accessible communication artifacts.

Outcome 3: Effectively collaborate with teammates and professionally communicate with clients; increase presentation skills, including creating effective slides and professionally presenting information to clients.

Outcome 4: Effectively compose various kinds of workplace documents to further a technical or engineering effort with consideration to context and audience, especially different cultural contexts and audiences from other cultures.

Outcome 5: Visualize, illustrate, and appropriately caption visuals; create accessible multimodal artifacts to support the technical endeavor.

Outcome 6: Design and conduct engineering and cross-cultural communication research for professional goals; access library databases and use sources accurately.