Inclusion of Industry Professional Experts in Biomedical Engineering Design Courses At-scale

Project-based design courses require teaching in diverse subject matters including design, intellectual property (IP), regulation, and market access. For large courses (>50 students) this is often managed by bringing in working professionals as lecture-platform guest speakers. Although the lecture format allows the speaker to reach a larger audience, it fails to provide project-specific information that is critical to decision making in these areas. Additionally, it is challenging to engage a large number of experts to work individually with student teams. A series of expert office hours were derived from the incubator model of mentors-in-residence to support a large 2-semester biomedical engineering (BME) design course in three domains: (1) intellectual property (2) device regulation (3) market access. These office hours were hosted by IP lawyers, regulatory consultants, and market access professionals. This model was successfully implemented to meet the demand of 120 students (15 teams) for project-specific feedback using a limited number of experts (1-2 per domain) and was widely accepted by the students, with >95% of students reporting the model met their needs.