Designing the Future of Engineering Education
The first GEDC Industry Forum took place in Fontainebleau, France in June 2017. It was created and organized by the GEDC and Petrus Communications, and sponsored by Total, National Instruments, and Boeing. The purpose of the Industry Forum was to provide a platform for engineering education and industry leaders to come together to discuss and build viable solutions to develop the engineering experts and leaders for the future and understand better each other’s needs.
Multiple challenges were addressed, such as the skills gap in the engineering and IT fields, which are attributable to a confluence of megatrends such as increased globalization; digitalization; and the blending of technical, economic, and societal structures, which have pushed the world into the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution.
The event included input from expert panelists in addition to highly interactive and innovative group work, during which a number of recurring themes emerged. The following were identified by delegates as areas that need to change for engineering education to best develop 21st-century engineers:
- Making accreditation systems more flexible – a more agile system is needed to keep up with the pace of change today
- Teaching students to learn how to – so that they can continue to learn beyond their formal education, to keep up with the changing demands of the labor market, society, etc.
- Incorporating other disciplines in engineering education – so that future engineers better understand how their work fits into a highly-interconnected world
- Allowing failure – because failure is an essential part of innovation and creativity, how can universities accommodate failure in their curricula?
- Using more problem-based learning – turning students into more active learners and teaching them skills they need for the workplace by providing them with ‘real-world’ problems faced by industry
- Increasing amount and regularity of collaboration between universities and industry – to ensure that both communities are on the same page regarding each other’s needs and expectations