What is the Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP)?

What we set out to achieve with the IEP

Launched in 2014, the UCL Integrated Engineering Programme (IEP) is the result of a major revision undertaken by UCL Engineering of its teaching and learning practice over the previous three years. While led by academics who would eventually form the Centre for Engineering Education, this was a cross-Faculty process built on input from UCL academics from a range of disciplines, largely implemented from the bottom-up.

The philosophy of the IEP is encapsulated by the idea that engineering is the art and practice of changing the physical world for the benefit of all. We want our students to graduate from their degree programmes with an advanced set of professional skills, similar understandings about engineering design, context and impact, and some shared identity. We also want them to have expertise in very different technical fields, an identification with their own discipline, and competence in and awareness of the abilities and topics prioritised by their home department.

Watch: video with Professors Emanuela Tilley and John Mitchell for ASEE Advances in Higher Education

How we do it

All students enter the IEP as part of one of their disciplinary specialisms but share a common framework of problem-based learning experiences and supported learning via a root-branch model that threads through the degree.

Whilst the level of the technical subjects covered by students remains as high as it was before, students now take part in engineering challenges and scenario weeks throughout the first two years of their programmes. They take on design projects, varyingly within their departments or in interdisciplinary teams, that require them to apply the knowledge gained from their studies. This culminates in an intensive two-week design capstone project called ‘How to Change The World’. Throughout these activities, students are required to work according to their projects' ethical, legal, social, economic and/or environmental contexts, sometimes including direct input and evaluation from industry and third-sector professionals. 

In their second and third years, students also undertake their IEP Minor. The IEP Minor is a consists of three modules grouped under a specific theme, for example regenerative medicine, robotics, ocean engineering or even modern foreign languages. Unique in UK engineering higher education, these allow students to customise their chosen engineering degree programme and study with different students from different backgrounds, disciplines and perspectives, and gain insight into specific engineering sectors.

Students still take several non-IEP modules offered as part of their own programmes, but our approach enables these to align and be mutually complementary with IEP-specific learning content.

Watch: Interview with Professor Emanuela Tilley for BEST, Board of European Students of Technology 

Which programmes follow the IEP?

Not all UCL undergraduate engineering programmes follow the IEP. However, elements at the heart of the IEP such as problem- and project-based learning inform teaching across UCL Engineering (for example on the UCL Engineering Foundation Year).

Students that take a programme that follows the IEP can expect to collaborate with their peers from other disciplines on programmes that also follow the IEP.

Learn more about the IEP

Contact the IEP team

Academics and professionals from UCL and other institutes: faceng.iep@ucl.ac.uk

Meet the IEP team

Members of the UCL Centre for Engineering Education who work on the IEP can be found on our People page.