There are ongoing concerns about the discrepancy between graduate engineering students‟ communication skills and those identified as necessary by Government and professional bodies. Communication skills are critical for engineering graduates as surveys of actual work practices indicate that engineers spend 40-60% of their time communicating and an increasing amount of their time writing. However, many engineering students find written assessments challenging and although they may well understand that to advance in their profession requires excellent communication skills, both spoken and written, many remain unconvinced and believe that their skills in other areas such as IT or mathematics will be of greater importance upon graduation. This attitude is often indirectly supported within engineering curricula where teaching writing skills is still considered a low priority and presents faculty staff with a number of challenges such as the ability to articulate how they assess student writing, the capacity to address issues of plagiarism and the provision of timely, relevant and appropriate feedback on writing to bring about improvements. An additional challenge is the diversity of the engineering cohort with large numbers of students from non-English speaking backgrounds, both local and international and that commencing engineering students may have had limited practice in extended writing.
A new online resource suitable for embedding writing skill development in the engineering curricula is described in this paper. It contains engineering based instructional materials, authentic writing examples, and eLearning feedback options. This online writing centre (iWrite), a collaboration between learning advisors and engineering faculty, can be mapped onto the CDIO Academy stages to develop writing skills across the undergraduate years.