The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

by J. Biggs and C. Tang, Maidenhead, England,
Open University Press, 2007, 360 pp., £29.99, ISBN-13: 978-0-335-22126-4

Teaching for quality learning at university

Eric Ries was born in September 1978. He graduated from Yale University and moved to silicon Valley in the beginning of the millennium. He pioneered the philosophy of Lean Startup, based on his experience with multiple startups, primary being IMVU which he co-founded along with Will Harvey in 2004. Eric Ries originated his Lean Startup philosophy after getting inspired from the Japanese Philosophy of Lean Manufacturing.

The Lean Startup:How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains

Aditya Johri and Barbara M Olds, eds, Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research, Cambridge University Press, 2014, ISBN: 978-1-107-01410-7

Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research

When drafting the first issue of this document it sometimes felt like I was manoeuvring a small canoe through a highly viscous fluid of conservatism and complacency, with everybody bogged down by today’s thinking, preparing next Tuesday’s nine o’clock lecture, aiming for the best learning experience by optimising teaching and assessment. The issues of the day are about the “how next week”, not about the “what next year”, let alone the “why in the next decade”. After publicising I was happy to discover that I had been somewhat mistaken in my impression. Many people in universities, industries and research institutes across the globe informed me they are with me in my canoe, or want to be. That they want to rethink higher engineering education and help initiate change to enhance the effectivity of engineering study programmes and professional training. Like me, they are concerned about as well as challenged by the technological revolution that will rock the foundations of engineering education in the coming decades. The first edition inspired many conversations about “The Future Engineer” at my home university and many partner universities and institutes abroad. The “Free Spirits” Think Tank of the 4TU.Centre of Engineering Education in the Netherlands, which investigates the rise of new engineering profiles in the coming 10 to 15 years and develops matching scenarios for campus education in 2030, has taken my vision as a source of inspiration. The numerous meetings and workshops I attended between engineering academics, industries and engineering consultancies in the Netherlands and abroad, and the conferences and panels of the global CDIO Initiative and the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) in Florence (2015) all discussed the subject of the engineer and industry of the future. They addressed the impact of the changing global economy, the fast pace of change, the Foreword to the Second Revised Edition limited shelf life of specialist knowledge, the university’s role in innovation, the need for an interdisciplinary mind-set, the global interconnectedness, the rise of machine intelligence and the use of open standards. These are all aspects that shape the rapidly changing world in which we live and in which we educate tomorrow’s engineers, who might be a different breed than the ones we have been educating over the past 50 years. These factors set the scene for the “why” and “what” of our future education.

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Engineering Education in the Rapidly Changing World: Rethinking the Vision for Higher engineering Education

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Engineering Education in the Rapidly Changing World: Rethinking the Mission and Vision on Engineering Education at TU Delft

Some times call for a change, some require consolidation. The question is: in which time do you live? Staring into the future doesn’t help, focusing too much on the past neither. It requires ‘reading the past to predict the future’. For that an open mind is needed, a critical assessing of the current and the past. For more than a decade, Ir. Aldert Kamp has done so. While in charge of the educational programmes of TU Delft’s Aerospace Engineers, he constantly scanned the world for clues on how to educate young engineers. Aldert consistently made a plea for outward looking: “open the windows and look around in the world; let the world flow in”. And so he did, travelling around, visiting the leading conferences and being a well-respected key note speaker, recognized by the great institutions like MIT. Aldert Kamp organised think tanks, free spirits to discuss the future of engineering education. He talked to the major industries trying to understand in what direction they were moving and what that meant for the education of the next generation (aeronautical) engineers. His ideas took shape more and more into the direction of real change. The current times are times of fast change, of greater uncertainty. Consolidation is no longer an option. Sure, engineers need engineering skills. But that will not suffice. Additional skills are needed and they cannot all be put in the heads and minds of each individual student. That made Aldert Kamp come up with various roles for different engineers. Roles that have one thing in common: they are connected to other roles and areas. Working in splendid isolation and then passing on the work to the next engineer is out. Team work, with multiple disciplines in each team, socially responsible engineering, entrepreneurial thinking, innovator roles, system thinkers and sustainability: those are the new ways of the world. In this book, Aldert has put together all the ideas, knowledge that he gained over the years. Read it! Even if you are not convinced that we are living in rapidly changing times. The timing of the book, now that the world is in turmoil due the corona virus couldn’t be better. Changing times, that’s what we are facing. And we have to find answers to cope with this. In this book you will find food for thought and inspiration from one of the current thought leaders in engineering education.

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Navigating the Landscape of Higher Engineering Education

Over the last couple of decades the world around us has changed at a dizzying pace by the globalisation and digitalisation, the horizontalisation of the socio-economic world, and the blending of technical, economical and societal cultures. The ways we communicate, work, play, travel and do business have changed dramatically, and are expected to change at an even faster pace in the future. We have entered an era where higher engineering education has to move from content coverage to content mastery. Are our programmes good enough to absorb the changes in the world 10 to 15 years from now? This paper discusses the results of an exploration by a Think Tank of academic staff about “what future engineers should learn in higher engineering education in 2030”. Key issues are the embedding of personal development in a meaningful way - the teaching of the “whole engineer”, the creation of purposeful engineering profiles for society, keeping them specific enough to create in-depth learning.

Impact of global forces and empowering situations on engineering education in 2030

This paper is a showcase for an on-going active learning capstone design project in the BSe. programme at the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology. In multi-disciplinary teams supervised by tutors from different backgrounds students work towards an Aerospace (related) design. In the exercise students learn about applying knowledge, working in teams, sustainable development, project management, reporting, presenting and design in a semi-professional environment.

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A. Kamp

Papers

Engineering Education in the Rapidly Changing World: Rethinking the Vision for Higher engineering Education

Engineering Education in the Rapidly Changing World: Rethinking the Mission and Vision on Engineering Education at TU Delft

Navigating the Landscape of Higher Engineering Education

Impact of global forces and empowering situations on engineering education in 2030

An example of active learning in Aerospace Engineering