Developing Skills for Industry 4.0: Challenges and Opportunities in Engineering Education

This Research to Practice Work in Progress Paper focuses on the Education 4.0 Framework, based on built-in skill development mechanisms and innovative learning pedagogies related to Active Learning approaches. Practicing engineers are increasingly expected to act as boundary spanners who manage and participate in diverse interdisciplinary global teams, leverage cultural differences, and draw on expert knowledge from multiple fields and specialities to translate competing stakeholders' needs into practical design solutions. This demand for a holistic type of engineer stems from the requirements of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: engineers who assume the role of leaders can integrate knowledge and work seamlessly across intellectual, social, and cultural challenges. Our exploratory study aims to identify the implications for practice, challenges, and opportunities in Higher Education. More specifically, we look at two engineering programs of two universities, one located in Mexico and the other in the United States of America. Both universities have implemented massive Experiential and Challenge-Based Learning efforts with industry and external organizations as educational partners to immerse students in real-life contexts. The methodology used was qualitative-experimental, involved more than 120 students, and included a post-test for skills assessment with different instruments such as rubrics, questionnaires, interviews, and surveys. The preliminary findings of this work-in-progress study reveal that the role of Higher Education professors in the training of future engineering professionals within the Education 4.0 Framework has different degrees of complexity related to the cross-border nature of educational innovation, that requires the commitment and alignment of multiple actors: students, professors, organizations, and industry.