Trends and Challenges in Engineering Education: Are we prepared for addressing them?

1. Trends and Challenges in Engineering Education:Are we prepared for addressing them? Uriel Cukierman uriel@utn.edu.ar

2. The Horizon Report • This report identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. • It also presents critical trends and challenges that will affect teaching and learning over the same time frame.

3. Key trends • The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing • People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want to • The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized • The work of students is increasingly seen as collaborative by nature, and there is more cross campus collaboration between departments

4. Critical challenges • The role of the academy – and the way we prepare students for their future lives – is changing • New scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching continue to emerge but appropriate metrics for evaluating them increasingly and far too often lag behind • Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession. • Institutions increasingly focus more narrowly on key goals, as a result of shrinking budgets in the present economic climate

5. Questions • Are we as teacher, researchers and educative institutions administrators prepared for addressing this issues? • Are our institutions technologically and, more important, organizationally prepared to cope with these trends and challenges? • Or shall we, once again in education history, let the train pass through our stations without being able to climb on it?

6. Attributes needed for the graduates of 2020 • Agree on an exciting vision for its future • Transform engineering education to help achieve the vision • Build a clear image of the new roles for engineers, including as broad-based technology leaders, in the mind of the public and prospective students who can replenish and improve the talent base of an aging engineering workforce • Accommodate innovative developments from nonengineering fields • Find ways to focus the energies of the different disciplines of engineering toward common goals.

7. More questions • Are we, engineers teachers, convinced about these ideas? • Are we able to adapt the engineering curriculum to face these challenges? • How will we instill these ideas in our students? • Are we well-disposed to modify the content of our syllabus in order to achieve those requirements? • Or is it easier for us to keep on doing what we have previously done for decades without modifying what we teach and how we do it?

8. Conclusion/discussion • We need: • To promote a strong and serious debates about these issues in our institutions. • To be open minded to modify our teaching and learning habits in order to address the outcomes of those debates. • To apply new technologies in our courses, not just as part of the curriculum, but as a way of improving our teaching methods. • To take advantage of our student’s natural abilities (digital natives) in order to engage them actively and effectively as protagonists of their own education.

9. The final question Are we prepared for addressing this challenges?