Engineering education

About: Engineering education is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 24293 publications have been published within this topic receiving 234621 citations.

Making Engineering Education Fun

Abstract: Maintaining student interest is more than an academic exercise. Institutions or departments that fail to challenge and actively involve their students in the learning process risk losing them to competing programs where the curricula are more dynamic and relevant. Within the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Oregon State University, we continually seek innovative ways to promote student retention while maintaining academic excellence. One recent effort was to restructure a first-year nuclear engineering/health physics course. Using nuclear techniques, students were required to solve a fictitious murder. In the process they learned about teamwork, nuclear forensics methods, radiation protection, and basic radiation interactions. The class members were brought into the mystery playing the part of “graduate students” who helped their police-detective uncle solve the case. To assist in their investigation the students subpoenaed expert “witnesses” to educate them on nuclear principles. The students, through homework, explained their actions, methods, and reasoning to a nontechnical participant (their “uncle“). By building on knowledge gained through interviews and homework, the students were able to solve the mystery. This mode of teaching requires extensive hands-on faculty participation. However, the potential long-term benefit is increased comprehension of course content as well as greater student interest and retention.

The Personal Epistemologies of Civil Engineering Faculty

Abstract: Background The personal epistemologies of engineering faculty are an important and as yet underinvestigated aspect of engineering education. In this study, personal epistemology is defined as the stances an individual takes on issues related to knowledge and knowing, such as what it means to know, what counts as knowledge, and what makes some knowledge true. Purpose (Hypothesis) This research characterizes the personal epistemologies of engineering faculty members with particular emphasis on contributing to the development of a theoretical framework to support and guide future research. Design/Method Semistructured interviews explored broad epistemological issues but were individually tailored to ensure open discourse. The interviews were situated in the domain of the participants' own research in civil engineering; this domain provided a familiar and rich research site in which to explore their epistemologies and allowed for richer interpretations through reference to other research linking research practice with epistemology. Results The participants expressed a stance that assumed an objective reality and verified the truth of their knowledge through observation, which assumes access to that objective reality. Participants simultaneously evaluated their knowledge based on its truth and usefulness. The participants' discussions reflected their perceptions of the complexity and wide scope of the “real” world – thereby moving beyond simplified categorizations such as positivist, into new and unexplored epistemologies. Conclusions The participants' epistemologies are discussed in terms of their implications for engineering education practice and research, as well as personal epistemology research.

State-of-the-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications

Abstract: There is no doubt that the implementation of practical sessions in engineering education paves the way for students to be familiar with the instruments and thus, with the industrial real-world. Moreover, they augment the learning outcomes by strengthening the understanding of scientific concepts and theories. Unfortunately, there exist a wide gap between the engineering educational curricula and the industrial real-world owing to the lack of experimentation availability. This is due to high cost and administration burdens that have hindered the adoption of practical sessions causing a significant decline in experimentation within engineering education. Recently, with the advent and exploitation of computer and communication technologies, remote laboratories have broadly proliferated among many universities. Remote laboratories provide on-line ubiquitous workbenches unconstrained by neither temporal nor geographical considerations and allow an interactive learning environment that maintains student attention. In this context, hundreds of remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications have been developed and numerous technologies have emerged in order to facilitate their construction and implementation. This paper reports on state-of-art remote laboratories for industrial electronics applications. and their design stages. The paper addresses many solutions in the development and the design stages, along with cutting edge technologies involved. This is in order to foster remote laboratories adoption within industrial electronics disciplines and hence, increase the industrial competencies in engineering education.

Systems engineering education

Abstract: The article discusses some basic principles underlying systems engineering, and the translation of these principles to practices such as to enable the engineering of trustworthy systems of all types that meet client needs. The article is concerned with systems engineering education. Thus, it is inherently also concerned with systems engineering, as this provides a major component of the material that is important for systems engineering education. After setting forth some of the necessary ingredients for success in systems engineering, we devote some comments to objectives for and needs in systems engineering education.