Bridging the Gaps between Technology and Engineering Education

The great technological development in which we are immersed has changed the scenarios, tools and forms of learning. In the light of those challenges, engineers must be able to develop new skills and abilities to face them, through planned technical pedagogical training that allows them to link technology with engineering education. As a result of previous research, the need for a link between technology and education in engineering was evident, as was the need for training in platforms for the creation of virtual learning spaces. To this end, the proposal was applied to a case study involving a group of engineering educators from the Escuela Politécnica Nacional de Quito. This research aims to present the results of the implementation of a training programme for engineering educators to improve their competence in new technologies and the teaching design methodologies applied to the design of online learning environments for engineering. To achieve this goal, the training included a framework based on pedagogical foundations, instructional and learning strategies, online learning technologies and good practices of engineering design activities, as well as a Learning Management System (LMS) platform adopted by the institution. The results of the implementation of this pedagogical technical training strategy show that 92% of engineering educators confirmed that the proposed framework helped them to develop online courses. In addition, 83% of engineering educators confirmed that the training course in the LMStool was useful. Additionally, it was confirmed, with an acceptance of more than 90%, that the inclusion of the recommendations for the design of the engineering activities was relevant. These results confirm the adaptability of engineering teachers to the application of new technologies and methodologies, and will enable the production of better qualified engineers to pursue this profession and face future challenges

Agile, Versatile, and Comprehensive Social Media Platform for Creating, Sharing, Exploiting, and Archiving Personal Learning Spaces, Artifacts, and Traces

Nowadays, students bring their full ecosystem of social media platforms and their own devices to school, while teachers benefit from and contribute to local or global repositories of educational resources. As a consequence, educational institutions have to better align their digital infrastructures and support schemes with these personal ecosystems and social practices. They also have to offer resources at a level of granularity aligned with targeted activities rather than full-fledged courses to ease personalization. Institutions finally have to ensure control of learning traces and persistence of learning outcome. To meet these needs, this paper presents Graasp.eu, a social media platform supporting digital education from primary and secondary school to higher education. Participatory design, fitness for active learning, and adoption are discussed as wel

The RAGE Game Software Components Repository for Supporting Applied Game Development

This paper presents the architecture of the RAGE repository, which is a unique and dedicated infrastructure that provides access to a wide variety of advanced technology components for applied game development. The RAGE project, which is the principal Horizon2020 research and innovation project on applied gaming, develops up to three dozens of software components (RAGE software assets) that are reusable across a wide diversity of game engines, game platforms and programming languages. The RAGE repository provides storage space for assets and their artefacts and is designed as an asset life-cycle management system for defining, publishing, updating, searching and packaging for distribution of these assets. It will be embedded in a social platform for asset developers and other users. A dedicated Asset Repository Manager provides the main functionality of the repository and its integration with other systems. Tools supporting the Asset Manager are presented and discussed. When the RAGE repository is in full operation, applied game developers will be able to easily enhance the quality of their games by including selected advanced game software assets. Making available the RAGE repository system and its variety of software assets aims to enhance the coherence and decisiveness of the applied game industry

RENEWAL OF AN INFORMATION SYSTEMS CURRICULUM TO SUPPORT CAREER BASED TRACKS: A CASE STUDY

The pace at which technology redefines traditional job functions is picking up rapidly. This trend is triggered particularly by advances in analytics, security, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence and big data. The purpose of this paper is to present a case study on our approach to renewing an undergraduate IS Major curriculum to align with the needs of the industry. We adopt a survey based approach to study Information Systems (IS) graduate skills requirements and re-design the curriculum framework for the IS program at our school. The paper describes in detail the process, the redesigned IS curriculum, the impact of the new curriculum on student enrolment across the different career tracks, and some lessons learned when trying to re-design the curriculum to align with industry needs. The work reported in this paper provides one pathway for Information Systems and Computer Science schools to re-engineer their curriculum design

The Value of Design Thinking for PhD Students: A Retrospective Longitudinal Study

Doctoral studies are changing worldwide, with growing concerns about doctoral graduates' employability and ability to develop relevant links with industrial challenges. The present study aims examine the impact of Design Thinking skills on PhD students on their future academic and professional performance. Drawing on 7 years of pedagogical experimentation, we conducted a mixed methods longitudinal study to investigate the perceptions of students who attended a two-day Design Thinking workshop. Two questionnaires, with a total of 40 items measuring the quality and course impact dimensions, were given to 415 and 41 students, respectively. Finally, 12 students were chosen for in-depth interviews to learn more about how they applied their newly acquired design thinking skills in their research and work. Our findings show that developing Design Thinking skills impacts the professional lives of students of all fields of knowledge, ages, and stages of their PhD. The primary outcomes mentioned are associated with increased creative confidence and collaboration abilities. This study focuses on relevant dimensions for designing and delivering Design Thinking skills within doctoral programmes, as well as the impact of design thinking on the quality of PhD education and student employability opportunities. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2023-SIED2-02 Full Text: PD

Innovations and Social Media Analytics in a Digital Society

Recent advances in digitization are transforming healthcare, education, tourism, information technology, and some other sectors. Social media analytics are tools that can be used to measure innovation and the relation of the companies with the citizens. This book comprises state-ofthe-art social media analytics, and advanced innovation policies in the digitization of society. The number of applications that can be used to create and analyze social media analytics generates large amounts of data called big data, including measures of the use of the technologies to develop or to use new services to improve the quality of life of the citizens. Digitization has applications in fields from remote monitoring to smart sensors and other devices. Integration generates data that need to be analyzed and visualized in an easy and clear way, that will be some of the proposals of the researchers present in this book. This volume offers valuable insights to researchers on how to design innovative digital analytics systems and how to improve information delivery remotely.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Innovations and Social Media Analytics in a Digital Society

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Addressing the skills gap for facilitating renewable energy entrepreneurship- an analysis of the wind energy sector.

With the rising global energy issues regarding sustainability, environmental degradation and fossil fuel exhaustion, several countries are now focusing on finding alternative sustainable solutions. At the current state, there are no clear alternatives other than renewable energy sources which have recently led to the increase of entrepreneurial businesses primarily dealing with the advancement and uptake of renewable energy technologies. However, being an under-researched area, there is no clarity on the skills associated with the business models of the renewable energy sector. What are the current trends in terms of the interpersonal, professional and core technical skills that employers are actively seeking in this sector? How will nascent entrepreneurs address the skills gap or subject specific knowledge challenges? Using content analysis, this study reviews online job advertisements to shed some light on the skills distribution in management and technical-oriented roles in the renewable job sector. The study found management-oriented roles to have a more widespread skills parameter in the personal skills category as compared to technical-oriented roles. The professional and technical skills distribution shows technical-oriented jobs seeking a higher rate of subject-specific skills or knowledge than management-oriented roles. The study also found a lack of choices for undergraduate degrees on renewable energy when compared with postgraduate degree choices in the UK. This raises several questions like whether such gaps in subject choices at universities are limiting the entrepreneurial prospects among students. Are these factors fuelling the technical skills deficit currently witnessed in the renewable energy job sector? Perhaps, there is a need for universities to revisit their business and programme design models to investigate whether the undergraduate programmes are being too generic for the 21st century entrepreneurial market

A conceptual framework for analyzing students' feedback

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier