A transformation model of engineering education

Abstract

A transformation model of engineering education at the undergraduate level is constructed to define the human and technical resources that contribute to the production of a university-trained engineer. The theory of technical systems is applied in the development of the model to transform a graduating pre-university pupil into a university-trained engineer. Two co-aligned themes are identified as the executive system and the execution system, which dictate who and what will do the work and how the work will be completed, respectively. The model is an extension of an existing model and further depicts the duality of the pre-university pupil as an operator and as the operand as related to engineering education. Consequently, the proposed model details the student perspective from the bottom-up in an implicit manner and the top–down perspective from administrators and professors in an explicit manner. The model's utility is in providing a means by which to coordinate efforts of pre-college and university-level educational sectors in the production of entry-level engineers.

Keywords:

• Engineering education
• Transformation model
• Undergraduate education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the ExxonMobil Foundation for supporting Dr Owens as a CASEE Scholar-In-Residence.