A Review and Evaluation of Engineering Education in Transition

This paper revisits success stories of past projects aimed at education transition through integrated curricula, multidisciplinary projects, and national/global technological issues. Successful programs depended heavily on interaction between educators and the professional engineers in the work force. Political priorities, both state and national, have played a major role in determining scope and success. Global issues are essential in most curricula since economic factors alone present major integrated components that engineers must understand. There are extraordinary opportunities, obstacles, and dangers ahead because we now are embroiled in the arena of "knowledge management," where massive information interconnections are expanding among businesses, universities, and political systems. This will create problems of privacy, ethics, and value in the absence of an honest and rigorous work force. Although we have made great progress in electrical engineering curricular transitioning, there is much to do, as Dr. Vartan Gregorian (Carnegie Corp.) predicts: "Laser communications, nuclear power, biotechnology, networked computers, and the like are precisely shaping our habits of thought and desire. They have become a dominant source of our culture, even to changing the very paradigms of knowledge. Rapidly evolving global communications are bringing social changes that are so complex and far-reaching they are not amenable to easy understanding." As education moved into the 21st century, business and society in general recognized the significance of "learning anywhere, anytime." Enabled through the powerful mechanism of communications and networking, education and industry quickly recognized the need for a new trained work force. Education saw the extraordinary advantage of combining their faculty with visiting faculty from industry, forming an integrated and multidisciplinary team. Transforming Engineering Education has been led by electrical engineering departments with support from IEEE and corporations like IBM. During this historic transition, input from students became increasingly important as they examined new careers combining fields like engineering, medicine, health care, business, science, and management, to name a few. Lifelong learning has long been a core priority for IEEE and IBM. Lifelong learning and "anywhere and anytime" courses clearly will get better because they will have the support of an extraordinary, dynamic network that is the platform for implementation. Interactions between people and programs are expanding understanding of terms like "knowledge management and computer simulations" driven by common sense evaluations and the continual search for and emphasis on the meaning or role of "wisdom" in these gigantic digital warehouses of data. Michael Crichton continually reminds us of the fragility of networks susceptible to misuse or misdirection resulting in catastrophic consequences for society. In this paper, three transition-based programs are reviewed: 1. A long-term university/corporation agreement involving technical management and product research 2. Creation of a unique College of Integrated Science and Technology at James Madison University in Virginia 3. A major governor-sponsored West Virginia technology bill aimed at statewide support of economic development and educational change implemented under Senate Bill 547. These programs had in common the following goals: for our students - the competitive advantage for the jobs of the future. for our educators - the technological resources for uncompromised quality of content and access.