Technical communication for civil engineering: academia-industry interdisciplinary needs

The prevailing civil engineering graduates' technical writing and oral presentation-related drawbacks have necessitated the design and implementation of demand-driven courses applying interdisciplinary pedagogy. This study investigates civil engineering academia-industry interdisciplinary contents, methods, and situations needed to design technical communication course. The analysis which engaged students, instructors, and professionals from industries employed sequential mixed methods design which grounds the quantitative analysis with exploratory detailed interviews. This revealed that classroom, internship, and industry contexts are essential foundations of interaction for stakeholders. Oral presentation, writing, reading, and evaluating technical documents infused with engineering design processes of initiating, designing, managing, and evaluating civil engineering projects were the contents selected from the needs analyses. Basic skills, rhetoric analysis, ethical and critical issues, and teamwork were the precedence pedagogical frames preferred to establish the methods of technical communication instruction. These interdisciplinary needs analyses imply how technical communication-related courses should be designed to enhance students' multiple competencies better than solely addressing instrumentally codified skills that deny the author and the discourse community.