While the fourth industrial revolution continues to change manufacturing enterprises all over the world, not all enabling key technologies are taught sufficiently at universities. For this purpose, a new lecture at the Montanuniversität Leoben was designed, teaching students of miscellaneous engineering disciplines, the fundamentals of…

The growing need for good teaching practices in Engineering Education (Eng.Ed) that will improve the graduate's complex engineering problem-solving skills, has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in recent years. This increasing interest demands that practitioners should examine their teaching practices from all corners,…

Interdisciplinary engineering programs have many perceived benefits including developing broader skills and an ability to work with complex real-life problems. However, the development of interdisciplinary programs faces many challenges including how to balance breadth and depth, how to integrate interdisciplinary learning into existing studies…

Many traditional engineering schools are struggling to balance the calls to provide an innovative engineering education that meet the demands of graduates and their employers with the constraints and momentum of their existing curriculum. In this paper we present the conceptual design behind a framework that integrates existing discipline-specific…

Co-design is fundamental to humanitarian engineering and increasingly recognised as such in engineering curricula. However, it is challenging to teach, learn, and assess. In this paper, we describe the development and validation of a scenario-based instrument to distinguish novice and expert approaches to co-design in the context of humanitarian…

This article discusses the tension between quality assurance and quality enhancement in engineering education at a programme level. It acknowledges that accreditation has evolved for many years, but does not agilely support innovation or implement changes in educational programmes. Existing quality assurance systems, institutional collaboration…

We present the lessons learnt in the process of adopting the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) approach for the curricular reform of the Computer Science program at the School of Engineering of the Universidad Católica de la Santísima Concepción, Chile. These lessons were gathered through a participatory and iterative process involving…

This paper examines the traditional engineering-based provision delivered to Product Design and Technology (B.Sc.) undergraduates at the Loughborough Design School and questions its relevancy against the increasing expectations of industry. The paper reviews final-year design projects to understand the level of transference of engineering-based…

Emissions reductions targets for the UK set out in the Climate Change Act for the period to 2050 will only be achieved with significant changes to the built environment, which is currently estimated to account for 50% of the UK's carbon emissions. The socio-technological nature of Civil Engineering means that this field is uniquely placed to lead…

This paper compares two models for reforming engineering education, problem/project-based learning (PBL), and conceive-design-implement-operate (CDIO), identifying and explaining similarities and differences. PBL and CDIO are defined and contrasted in terms of their history, community, definitions, curriculum design, relation to disciplines,…

In the academic year 2010-2011, Spain finished the process of introducing the regulatory changes derived from the Bologna Declaration and the new European Space for Higher Education (ESHE). These changes have implied the updating of university degrees' structure as well as the inclusion of the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). This paper…

This paper describes research underpinning a course, developed in Australia, on ethics for engineers. The methodology used, that of identifying the principal ethical issues facing the discipline and designing the course around these issues, would be applicable to other disciplines and in other countries. The course was based on the assumption that…

In this article, the authors support problem-based learning (PBL) based on its high level of alignment in addition to providing learners in engineering with an additional opportunity in learning process competencies, as contained within the South African National Critical Cross-field and Developmental Outcomes (COs). Constructive alignment…

This paper offers a multi-perspective view on engineering education at RWTH Aachen University: curriculum design, examples of newly developed teaching methods for engineering curricula, and teaching competencies and teacher qualification. It is based on the theories of student-centred learning, project learning, social skills, etc., but the paper…

A competence-based approach was applied to a blended learning on line distance training in the Euroinno EU project aimed at vocational training in building automation. The current paper describes the experience gathered during the learning process and the definition of the curriculum. A number of issues emerged during the sessions concerning…