Fostering Collaborative Learning and Educational Mass Customization in a Graduate Level Engineering Design Course

The rapid progress of globalization has lead to many unprecedented changes in the world in whichour students will practice. New product development paradigms such as mass collaboration areredefining the way in which products are realized. The authors believe that in the light of thesechanges, new approaches to educating the next generation of engineers are needed. Towards thisgoal, the authors present a pedagogical approach to allow students to experience mass collaborationand to improve their understanding of emerging trends in product development. The approachis designed to foster collective learning and to apply mass customization in education. It ispresented in the context of a graduate engineering design courseÐ`Designing Open EngineeringSystems'. Two of the main features of the approach are: (1) providing the students with theopportunity to define their own learning goals, and (2) posing a broad question to which thestudents are required to develop an answer by the end of the semester. All activities of the course are geared towards answering this questionÐboth individually and collectively. Collective learning isfacilitated through semester-long continuous development of a collaborative answer to the Q4S bythe entire class. Mass customization of education is achieved by having students define theirpersonal semester goals as well as personalizing their answer to the Q4S. A web-based collaborativelearning framework is developed for this course using social networking tools to facilitatecommunication, and to simulate a mass collaborative environment. The authors believe that suchpedagogical approaches are essential for developing a foundation for next generation educationalenvironments

Strategic Design of Engineering Education for the Flat World

We believe that two critical success factors for an engineer in the flat world are an ability to adapt to changes and to be able to work at the interface of different disciplines. Instead of educating traditional domain-specific and analysis-orientated engineers, we believe that the focus should be on educating and graduating strategic engineers who can realize complex systems for changing markets in a collaborative, globally distributed environment. We identify three key drivers that we believe are foundational to future engineering design education programs. These drivers are a) emphasis on strategic engineering, b) mass customization of courses, c) utilization of IT-enabled environments for distributed education. Strategic engineering is a field that relates to the design and creation of complex systems that are adaptable to changes. Mass customization of courses refers to adapting the course material to educational goals and learning styles of different students. IT enabled environments bring distributed students and instructors closer in the form of a virtual classroom

Educating Engineers for the Near Tomorrow

In this paper, we present an educational approach to facilitate Learning how to Learn, that is, to equip our students with competencies needed to become lifelong learners and succeed in the job market of the near tomorrow. Our approach is anchored in educational and instructional theory and closely tied to current professional practice. The approach is implemented in a graduate level engineering design course that is offered in a distributed collaborative distance learning setting