Design and Development of an Advanced Smart Cities Course for Engineering Undergraduates

In this paper, a design and development of an advanced Smart Cities technical elective asynchronous online course for engineering undergraduates have been presented. In this design, a detailed description of course learning outcomes (CLOs), a selection of course contents, instruction modality, access to contents, course requirements, and a typical assessment scheme have been presented. So far, this course, entitled ENGR 402 (Smart Cities: Engineering the Future), has been taught successfully at the University of Wisconsin (UW)-Green Bay, USA, since fall 2021 term in three different versions, namely, a regular 14-week term (fall), a 3-week term (January interim), and a 4-week term (summer) in asynchronous online modality. Thus far, the course has been quite successful in providing the students with an advanced knowledge of smart cities and their associated functionalities, and, therefore, contributes to revision and modernization initiatives towards development of sustainability-focused engineering curricula. Reflections from teaching this course has been presented as well. This technical elective course has been designed in such a way that the same or a similar course can also be designed and taught at another institution as an upper-level technical elective course. Finally, this ENGR 402 course stands as an example of a successful sustainability-focused course that is incorporated in the process of modernizing a regular engineering curriculum for undergraduates.