Many faculty believe that engineering education in America is at a crossroads and much change is needed. International competition in engineering and the global economy have major potential impact on the engineering workforce of the future. We must find ways to educate U.S. engineers to be competitive and creative contributors in the worldwide arena. Recent national reports are sounding the alarm that the U.S. is losing it leadership in technology and innovation, with consequences for economic prosperity and national security. The report Rising Above the Gathering Storm discusses this dilemma in detail and offers four recommendations to U.S. policymakers. The report Educating the Engineer of 2020 discusses new ways to prepare American engineers for the 21^st Century. Furthermore, changes in ABET accreditation, along with new paradigms of teaching and new technology in the classroom, are changing the scholarship of engineering education. We must find ways to promote change in engineering faculty for this new opportunity in engineering educational scholarship. Future engineering students are now in K-12, which is becoming an increasingly diverse population that in the past has not been fully represented in engineering education. Current trends show disaffection for pursuing studies in science and engineering in the youth of our U.S. society. We must find new ways to portray engineering as an exciting and rewarding career, and certainly as an educational platform for professional careers beyond the baccalaureate degree.

View full 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.

View full abstract

The Accreditation Board for Engineering Education in Korea was founded in 1999 and the first engineering education programs were accredited in 2001. The purpose of accreditation was to attract outstanding students to engineering colleges as well as to raise highly qualified engineers who would be recognized internationally. The accreditation of engineering education has expanded as more and more colleges and programs are asking to participate in this accreditation program. This study examines the current position and future direction of Korean engineering education To develop further, engineering education in Korea requires more support to attract outstanding students to engineering colleges and to provide high quality education. Also, Korea should become a member of Washington Accord to be recognized as international level of engineering education as well as active cooperation from engineering related organizations, institutions, and businesses.

View full abstract

Facing the development of the 21_st century, Chinese government and CE Providers have realized the importance and the urgency of continuing engineering education. China has over 50000 continuing education institutions of various scales and levels. The education quality and teaching measures of those institutions are varied and there is a big gap comparing with developed countries. Such weaknesses as the insufficient investment from the government, incompetence of the teachers, irregular standards for the execution and the inadequate quality evaluation have seriously restricted the development. Evaluation of various continuing education institutions in some Latin and European countries have been conducted in the past few years by adopting different executive models and evaluation standards. China is seeking ways to start such evaluation by collaborating with international organizations. We intend to explore and establish proper evaluation system and evaluation standards, which are suitable to China and inconsistent with the development of China, and to help Chinese CE providers reach international criteria step by step.

View full abstract

The Association for Engineering Education in Southeast Asia, East Asia and the Pacific was established with the aim to improve the education of engineers and technologists in its member countries. This paper will give an overview of AEESEAP objectives and its current activities, coordinated by the current secretariat based in Malaysia. The main issue being dealt with throughout the existence of AEESEAP is the issue of sustainability of the association. This paper will highlight the objectives and current activities of AEESEAP, with regards to sustaining this association.

View full abstract

The economic depression during the last decade of the 20th century caused various drastic changes in the social structure, including employment and educational systems. Japanese universities have devoted much effort to research activity and the development of teaching methodology for engineering education was not a major effort for professors. Decrease of 18 years old population, however, forced universities to change this attitude. University education is no more for only elite but is becoming very popular among young people. Another impact came from the ‘globalization’ of industrial societies such as establishment of WTO and APEC. Japan Accreditation Board for Engineering Education (JABEE) was established to cope with both domestic and international problems in 1999, and JABEE was admitted as a full signatory member of the Washington Accord in 2005. The Professional Engineer Law was amended linked with JABEE. The importance of engineering ethics has been recognized with these social structure changes. This paper describes the problems now Japanese engineering education is facing and the role of Japanese Society for Engineering Education (JSEE) in order to reorganize the engineering education in Japan.

View full abstract

Along with rapidly expanding applications of life science and technology, technical experts have been implicated more and more often with ethical, social, and legal problems than before. It should be noted that in this background there are scientific and social uncertainty elements which are inevitable during the progress of life science in addition to the historically-established social unreliability to scientists and engineers. In order to solve these problems, therefore, we should establish the social governance with ‘relief’ and ‘reliance’ which enables for both citizens and engineers to share the awareness of the issues, to design social orders and criterions based on hypothetical sense of values for bioethics, to carry out practical use management of each subject carefully, and to improve the sense of values from hypothetical to universal. Concerning these measures, the technical experts can learn many things from the present performance in the medical field.

View full abstract

Much attention has been attracted to collaborative learning on an e-learning system. However, it is difficult to implement the collaborative environment to an asynchronous e-learning system since collaboration would be realized only when learners join the system at the same time. On the other hand, cooperative learning has been proposed. In this method, learners can study on their own pace without making mutual agreement but with receiving cognitive information from others. In this paper, the authors have developed the asynchronous cooperative e-learning system that provides learners' attendance and studying progress as the cognitive information. The subjective evaluation experiments show that our system is slightly inferior to the synchronous collaborative e-learning system, but it can motivate the learners more than the conventional system.

View full abstract

The Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University started in 2002 the project of “An International Student Network” on Multidisciplinary Research Laboratory System for Future Development. The concept, system and activity for encouraging students to create their international human-relation network for young researchers and engineers are described. Some typical activities are introduced in detail.

View full abstract

We have been trying to heighten students' creativity at The Center for Innovation and Creativity Development by teaching the students of some autonomous project activities. As a result of continuous efforts during eighteen months, we have found that heightening students' abilities for planning are important issues. And we have shown that the presentation assessment procedure performed in The University of Tokushima can be applied to a plannability assessment procedure. In this paper, we will show that the assessment for the contents of presentations can be affected by presenters' narrative skills, and will report the result of the new method by which we analyze the documents for the presentations and directly estimate the students' plannabilities.

View full abstract

Students have failure experiences in the project-based learning but they do not profess their experiences. On the other hand, failures and accidents, in the industrial world, are analyzed frequently, and a knowledge data base on failure and QC activities have been introduced. To turn failure experience in education to advantage, the authors survey the properties of failures in project based learning and views of students, teachers and managers of design divisions in companies. Teachers and students regard failure experiences as instructive and acceptable. The typical causes of failure in educational institutions are luck of skill in manufacturing and inadequate planning, which are minor causes of failure in the industry. To establish a knowledge data base on failure in educational institutions, properties of failure in education should be taken into account.

View full abstract

The important abilities for which the young engineers are required are creativity, ability for solving a problem and presentation ability. However, the education curriculum for creation of products in the present university has the contents that the students in each group only make a product, so that they can not learn how to raise above-mentioned three abilities. In the faculty of engineering, University of Toyama, a new subject “creative engineering exercise” opened to all courses and grades students has started in 2004. The authors reexamined the subject, and then the improved new subject “creative engineering exercise” that can meet the requirements from society has started in 2005. The feature of this new subject is that the lectures are adopted in the subject in order to learn how to raise above-mentioned creativity, ability for solving a problem and presentation ability.

View full abstract

Project-Based Learning (PBL) education has become popular in the US and its educational effects have been recognized in many case studies. PBL also attracts attention of the educators in Japan, and several achievements have also been reported. However, because of its short history and its different backgrounds on the corporate sponsorship to academic institutions, implementation of PBL in engineering education has not so much been achieved well and its educational effects have not been recognized enough. This paper picks up one of the best examples of PBL class with robotic project at MIT in the US, and reviews the key factors why the class works so successfully. Comparing the review results with the experiences in the engineering class of CAD-EX at the University of Tokushima, this paper discusses the basic requirements on PBL, emphasizing the importance of strenuous efforts to encourage students towards motivated attitudes, creative learning and active participation in the class under the healthy and friendly competitive atmosphere.

View full abstract

Yumekobo, which can be translated as “Factory for Dreams and Ideas” , has been attracting the attention of reform-minded educators in Japanese universities. The major function of Yumekobo is to support a student project called the Yumekobo project. It resembles an extra-curricular club activity as at other universities; however, the Yumekobo project is not only an extra-curricular activity but also a symbol of the educational philosophy of Kanazawa Institute of Technology. Students in the Yumekobo project are encouraged to develop a good character, which includes independence, creativity, morality, cooperation, and internationalism. In this paper, an overview of the Yumekobo project is given, and its characteristics are described. Further, its educational effects are discussed based on an analysis of student questionnaires conducted from 2002 to 2005.

View full abstract

Recently, universities send out questionnaire to students. Result of this questionnaire is used for improving lectures. However, subjective views of students control result of questionnaire. Therefore, there is a necessity for analyzing result of questionnaire. This paper uses regression analysis and quantification theory type 3. In conclusion, this paper explains relation between student's satisfaction and grade by analysis of result of questionnaire.

View full abstract