Research and Innovation of Engineering Education in Europe the contribution of SEFI

Abstract

The roots of engineering education lie in the workplace. It was not until the 19th century that higher engineering education moved to a more scholarly environment. True to its origins, research in the applied sciences never aimed at pure understanding alone. The goal of engineering investigations has always been to devise solutions to practice problems with a mixture of design, construction and innovation. If the establishing of a research tradition in engineering has taken quite a long time, the time needed to apply an academic mode of thinking to the approach to teaching and learning has been much longer. In fact, most of the design choices concerning the curricula in higher engineering education were made based on intuition, rather than on insight, until well over the half of the last century.
Aiming at to support the development of engineering education in Europe, in 1973 the European Society of Engineering Education was established (labelled SEFI according to the French acronym Société. Européenne pour la Formation des Ingénieurs). Presently the society represents 196 institutional members. SEFI promotes cooperation between higher engineering education institutions and other scientific and international bodies on issues of research and development in Engineering Education, for instance through participating in European network projects such as the SOCRATES Thematic Network “TREE” (Teaching and Research in Engineering Education in Europe). SEFI is also engaged in policy development regarding engineering education publishing statements regarding issues like the Bologna process and the proposed European Institute of Technology. In the future SEFI aims to consolidate and strengthen its role in the European arena and to represent Europe on the Global stage.