In 2008 Aalborg University in the north of Denmark hosted the 36th Annual SEFI Conference. The main sponsor of the conference was the energy company Vattenfall A/S. The theme of the conference was: Quality Assessment, Employability and Innovation. Within this theme 111 papers were presented highlighting current aspects of Engineering Education. During the conference the session chairs were invited to nominate outstanding papers. The authors of the best nominated papers were invited to expand their work and to submit it for publication in the European Journal of Engineering Education.
Subsequently these papers have gone through the journal's normal process of reviewing. It turned out there was quite a discrepancy between an excellent paper at the conference and a paper acceptable for publication in the journal. The difference was not so much in the quality of the work, but rather in the choice of topics and the maturity of the work reported. Many of the conference papers are basically case descriptions, presenting experiences with innovative educational methods. Empirical research and data analyses are missing in most instances. In some instances a reviewer – unaware of the history of the paper in a blind reviewing process – commented that a paper was suitable for presentation at a conference, but that more fundamental work was needed to turn it into a journal article. We have been working intensively with the authors to achieve a theme issue containing a series of interesting well written papers, documenting the main area's of interest that were discussed at the 2008 Annual SEFI conference.
The final selection consists of seven papers. In the first paper Leo Van Biesen and colleagues present a Case Study on the engineering skills education at the Bachelor in engineering programme of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The authors describe how the Bologna process has triggered an important change process in Engineering Education in Belgium. The second paper is from a group of Authors from Australia who discuss several aspects of the concept of reality in the context of education. The third paper, from a couple of authors from Aalborg University deals with creativity. The authors present the Creative Platform. This is a didactic model aiming for unlimited application of knowledge in interdisciplinary and intercultural groups. The fourth paper by Markku Markkula & Pia Lappalainen introduces a new concept for higher education in Finland: The Innovation University. And the fifth paper, also from Finland outlines experiences with an interdisciplinary training campaign for industrial design and engineering students. In the sixth paper Christie & Garrote Jurado discuss barriers to innovation in online pedagogy. And finally in the seventh paper Hazelton and colleagues from Australia present a multicultural, multidisciplinary course aiming to introduce recently graduated engineers to the global nature of professional practice.
We hope you will enjoy reading this selection of papers.