Engineering curriculum structure and mapping: accreditation and beyond (original) (raw)
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Engineering curriculum review: processes, frameworks and tools
Periodic review and enhancement of curricula in engineering is vital to maintaining the quality and currency of undergraduate degree programs. The process of reviewing curriculum, however, is challenging on many fronts, and can appear overwhelming to those leading the review and implementing subsequent changes to the curriculum. Particular challenges include: involving all academic staff in the process to promote ownership of change; developing processes to guide the review toward improvements in the quality of content and of students' experiences of being taught; and remaining mindful of the constraints and requirements of contextual factors like university policy, needs of external stakeholders and finite time and money for teaching. This paper describes selected processes and tools that the authors have adapted or developed and applied in engineering curriculum review at three different engineering faculties. Two of these faculties were Australian and a third South American. We explain each of the processes and tools, and then discuss how each has contributed to simplifying, representing and facilitating discussion about the unwieldy amount of information embodied in engineering curriculum. We also comment on the different responses to use of these tools and processes at the three engineering faculties in which they have been applied.
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This work presents the advances being made on a research project addressing curriculum processes for the development of competencies at the San Juan National University's Faculty of Engineering (Argentina) in the framework of institutional policies that seek to make its programs of study appropriate for the second generation of accreditation standards. This is an exploratory, descriptive and interpretative study that is currently in the analytic phase, during which time we have carried out a characterization of the study plans currently in force for seven engineering programs in place at the university. In this sense, we describe both the institutional transformation related to the creation of accreditation standards and the perspectives of institutional actors as regards the curriculum design of the San Juan National University Faculty of Engineering's programs, analyzing the institutional dynamic that emerges from said process.
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The problem of how to deal with overloaded curriculum and out-of-date content faces many engineering course co-ordinators. Engineering is a rapidly evolving field, and recent changes in the higher education landscape (eg. changed accreditation expectations; changing demands of incoming students) mean curriculum rationalisation is a priority. As Professor Norman Fortenberry has said :
2013 ASEE International Forum Proceedings
is Innovation Professor in Engineering Education in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at RMIT University. He is a civil engineer with 20 years involvement in leading change in engineering education, with a particular focus on problem/project-based learning (PBL), at RMIT, Monash and Melbourne Universities. Roger is an ALTC Discipline Scholar in Engineering and ICT, having co-developed the draft national academic standards for the discipline. He is currently Program Director for the Bachelor of Sustainable Systems Engineering and also works on curriculum issues across the College of Science, Engineering and Health at RMIT. He is a passionate advocate of national and international cooperation in engineering education, particularly the sharing of best-practice learning materials.
Improving Outcomes-Based Engineering Education in Australia
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Graduate attributes are now a ubiquitous feature of higher education in Australia and internationally, and have been part of engineering education for more than a decade. The idea of graduate attributes is an apparently simple concept, focusing on educational outcomes, rather than inputs and process. While there is evidence of some benefits in engineering education arising from the introduction of outcomes-based accreditation, there is also evidence of many shortcomings of the graduate attributes approach. There would be significant value in Engineers Australia providing additional, discipline-specific guidance on attribute development. There would be significant value in Engineers Australia simplifying and consolidating the current multi-document accreditation system. A genuinely outcomes-based accreditation system would be based (only) on the demonstrated individual student attainment of appropriate graduate attributes, which might be delivered/gained by a range of means, including distance education. To fully meet the letter and spirit of the law for accreditation, programs will need to adopt some method of certification of individual student attainment of graduate attributes-one such method would be the use of student portfolios.
The recent growth of engineering education has put pressure on the quality in order to produce competent global engineering professionals. Accreditation, being the most influential tool of quality assurance, can be used to enhance the engineering education and engineering profession. Prior to year 2000, accreditation requirements for engineering courses in Malaysian Universities follow the age-long standard which enjoys Universities to demonstrate availability of physical and human resources (inputs) needed in training students in the respective disciplines offered by the programmes. Education sector is emerging as a new industry propelling the economic growth other than the financial sector and tourism. Many countries including Malaysia are now experiencing fast growth in this sector with the growth of both local and foreign students in the tertiary education. Owing to the contribution of Engineering profession to human development in recent times and its centrality to all facets of development, a new paradigm in form of broader, and self-enhancing, and self-regulating assessment called outcome-based was adopted. This new assessment paradigm is by necessity quality assurance-based and outcome-based to reduce the cost of reaccreditation on both the University and accreditation bodies and simultaneously fulfils both technical and social needs of the society on the young engineers. This paper presents the experience of Faculty of Engineering at the international Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM) in implementing a self-regulating, self-enhancing, ethical-laden, and outcome-based assessment.
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In general, the accreditation is a process intended to ensure that degree programs in engineering fields are consistent with regards to quality standards and requirements set by their respective professional organizations. Initialed in 1932, as the Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (ECPD) and then in 1980 renamed as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), Inc. is a coalition of over thirty five professional societies and organizations with over two thousands volunteers conducting program reviews. Over the past two decades, many academic institutions outside the United States had prepared and have gone through the accreditation process and more are joining annually. This paper presents the process and its challenges as well as the experience gained by an American university branch campus in in the Middle East. The paper also presents the benefits of accreditation in attracting more academic well-trained students to engineering programs.
Curriculum analysis process: Analysing fourteen industrial engineering programs
University of Minho, 2019
The fourth industrial revolution is demanding for new competences, thus requiring curricula redesign. A comprehensive analysis of current curricula contributes for the design of the new foreseen curricula. According to Hoffman (1999, p. 283): "the design of learning programs may be based on the inputs needed or the outputs demanded". Thus, curriculum analysis is helpful to identify aspects that are working and those that need a change (Wolf, Hill, & Evers, 2006). This purpose is crucial in the context of Industry 4.0, in order to prepare future engineers to face the challenges of their practice. Considering that in Europe, in general, formal curriculum level presents the structural aspects (e.g. hours and number of courses) and the learning outcomes of each course, it is possible to identify the areas of knowledge and the competences students are expected to develop. This paper aims to make a curriculum analysis, based on areas of knowledge and learning outcomes. This was based on a process exploring information from the formal level of curriculum that can be replicated in other contexts. Additionally, the process was applied to fourteen European Industrial Engineering master programs. The results show that there is a high level of diversity regarding main areas of knowledge and technical competences of each program. Moreover, it showed an enormous lack of attention in terms of transversal competences in all programs.