Page 71 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
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54 EDUCATING THE ENGINEER OF 2020

Curricular approaches that engage students in team exercises, in
team design courses, and as noted above, in courses that connect engi-
neering design and solutions to real-world problems so that the social
relevance of engineering is apparent appear to be successful in retaining
students. However, the designs of such approaches and assessment of
their effectiveness in terms of how to evaluate individual student perfor-
mance are still not well rooted in rigorous investigation. Changes in
engineering learning experiences involving curricula, pedagogies, and
support services should be based on research on learning. Thus, we rec-
ommend that

5. The engineering education establishment, for example, the
Engineering Deans Council, should endorse research in engineer-
ing education as a valued and rewarded activity for engineering
faculty as a means to enhance and personalize the connection to
undergraduate students, to understand how they learn, and to
appreciate the pedagogical approaches that excite them.

At the application end of engineering practice, there is a growing
disconnect with engineering education that begs for enlightened indus-
trial engineering leaders and a new generation of faculty able to bridge
the gap more effectively. For their part, if engineering faculty, as a group,
are to adequately prepare students for practice, then some population
within that group must have credible experience in the world of non-
academic practice. This is not a recommendation that all engineering
faculty must have “n” years of experience in industry. It is a recommen-
dation that departments need to more closely examine the mix of skills
and experiences possessed across their cadre of faculty to determine how
best to provide students with the knowledge and experiences essential to
engineering practice. The engineering education establishment should
strengthen the ties binding engineering education to practice not only
through curricular design and provision of co-curricular activities, but
through the experiences of engineering faculty in industrial research,
product design, and/or production. Thus, we recommend that

6. Colleges and universities should develop new standards for
faculty qualifications, appointments, and expectations, for example,
to require experience as a practicing engineer, and should create or

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