Improving Engineering Education Today

Dr. Jim burns

If the experiences acquired by the author are a good indication, much of what ails the practice of engineering education can be cured by providing product realization as a method of self-expression and, even self-invention for the growing numbers of students who feel disenfranchised with the current system. Tremendous personal growth and "self-invention" was observed in the student PRP participants. This is believed to be a result of unsullied feedback the student receives from the team, the sponsors, the "Tao" of the engineering process and from themselves while working on a "real" goal.

"I chose engineering because I was always taking things apart as a kid to see how they worked"

is a common declarative statement made by engineering students. Analysis may satisfy their need to know, abstractly, how something works, but, modern engineering education often leaves out the act of knowing by touching and doing that hides in that statement. What also hides in that statement is the likelihood that the student, as a child, never got those "things" back together, but always wanted to overcome that challenge. The act of creation is a powerful implied incentive to engineering students. Traditional engineering education often teaches those things that might be useful in the process of product creation or realization, but seldom, until its almost too late to reinforce the analysis (i.e. in capstone design courses) does it permit trial-by-nature practice of the blending of skills, many of which are not engineering-based, that is the art of engineering. The healthy, collaborative, multidisciplinary process of applying learning and all the senses to stimulate further learning to produce an artifactual expression of value that was conceived and realized in harmony with the individuals and the greater community is what most of my students want. They want the promise of permanence and community that a tangible, coherent end-product brings, as a symbol of their right of passage into the working world at the end of there university experience.

What stands in the way of this utopia is a slow-to-change mind-set that fails to recognize students as products. The students themselves know that the methods of measurement applied to their "progress" by schools, as well as the methods of quality improvement, are at odds with the methods of worth measurement applied by industry and society. If students know this, why don't schools? The author feels that the problem lies in a self-serving definition of faculty quality metrics, which leads to a lack of will to devote resources to the creation of better product quality measurement tools and to a lack of acceptance of the idea that educators are those measurement tools. A self-serving definition of education process quality in terms of quantity of students "served" (as if they were hamburgers), student scores from abstract, easy-to-quantify and easy-to-grade exams, number of faculty papers published, dollars in grants received, respect of peers, etc. has led universities away from forcing educators to create educated students as a primary goal. The traditional faculty member may expend resources to further his/her own standing among peers or to become pre-eminent in some branch of knowledge, and, oh by the way, a few graduate students might benefit through osmosis, but these are primarily selfish activities. Investing in undergraduate students and watching them leave takes a certain selflessness that is not rewarded because the tools (reward and punishment system) used to measure the tools (faculty) used to measure the quality of the process (education) used to produce the product (students) are flawed. After a while, all the products are substandard and the customer, with no other supplier, has taken to remanufacturing every product and searching for the least damaged product, because the factory, being populated with way to many accountants and way too few skilled artisans voted democratically to throw out all the dial micrometers, oscilloscopes and load cells. This Darwinian waste of raw material, and good measurement tools leads to no end of evil.

Product development will not take its rightful place as a powerful unifying process in the collective goal of value-through-education until it can be helped to shake off the educator's own perception that it is not valuable personally (we do what we are rewarded for), and that using knowledge to teach others to use knowledge is no less valuable than creating knowledge. Because it competes with the on-the-job student remanufacturing process "burden" that was shifted to and resignedly accepted long ago by the private sector, and because private sponsorship of a change to student-as-product is resource intensive and can not currently guarantee a sponsor a return on that investment, the sponsor/customer doesn't vote with sufficient dollars in the form of grants for PRP to gain favor in the university. Lots of little contracts, which focus the PRP teams and tie them to extrinsic value production, but nothing on the order of the $250K needed to make a university blink. The voice of the customer in not making it through the quality metric "filters" of the university. Agility achieved through latest tools and methods can allow near-miracles to occur in PRP education efforts. These efforts can homologate the university experience for students, faculty, and industry. SDSU's FAME is an attempt to prove that thesis.