A New Training Mode and Practice for Master of Engineering in a Chinese University

This Innovate Practice Full Paper presents the past process of the full-time Master of Engineering (M. Eng.) education in China, which is designed to meet the requirements of the China's innovation of science and technologies. Under the current trend of the economic globalization and the internationalization of higher education, China's higher engineering education (HEE) must carry out certain reforms to adapt to the new changes and development of the country. In China's HEE, M. Eng. program can be divided into two categories: in-service M. Eng. program and full-time M. Eng. program. The graduate students of the former program come from the employees of enterprises and study in their spare time, while the graduate students of the latter program mainly come from the fresh graduates of universities and they spend their full time for study. Normally they both spend 2 to 3 years to finish their master programs. This paper mainly discusses the current situation of full-time M. Eng. education, and analyzes the corresponding difficulties from the following four aspects: insufficient clarity in the training goal, incompleted Dual Tutor System, unsatisfactory enterprise practice, and insufficient interaction between university and enterprise. Therefore, full-time M. Eng. education still faces some immature situation and has higher demand for the innovation. This paper takes the big data full-time Master of Engineering (BDFM) training as a case, and introduces a new training and practice mode in a Chinese university, including project management, establishment of Practice Education Base (PEB), course construction, design of mechanism of PEB, as well as the establishment of Dual Tutor Matching Mechanism (DTMM). Considering the internationalization of HEE under China's national conditions, we show how to speed up the educational reform of M. Eng., how to implement educational innovation, how to promote the engineering education to better adapt to the needs of economic and social development, and how to play the exemplary role of this new training mode. We hope our study could contribute to the sustainable development of HEE over the world.