Engineering Education at a Crossroads - How Changes in the Technology and in the Marketplace are Forcing a New Reform in Engineering Education

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• Professor Moshe Kam, IEEE President
• Monday 28 March 2011, 11:00-11:45
• Dennis Gabor Seminar Room 611, EE Dept..

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Professor Peter Cheung.

Since World War 2 Engineering Education has undergone two major waves of reform. The first, in the decade after the War, was motivated by the deficiencies of several engineering disciplines and engineering practitioners (most notably in Electrical Engineering and Control), which were exposed during the War. This first reform replaced an educational model based on hands-on experience and apprenticeship by a methodical discipline rooted in science and based on calculus-based physics. It has also introduced graduate education as a key element in engineering education. The second reform wave, in the 1990s, aimed at returning some of the experimental and hands-on experiential element to engineering education, and increase emphases on team work, interdisciplinary work, ethical considerations, societal impact, and improved communication skills of engineers. The main argument of this presentation is that engineering education is ripe for a third major reform. The driving forces of this reform are: the impact of modern computing on the way engineering is practiced; the increased role of engineers as authors of software; the growing opportunities at the intersection between engineering disciplines, computer science, and the life sciences; the globalization of the engineering labor market; the rise of the service economy; and changes in the employment model of engineers by technology firms. Among the likely outcome are: a new role for computing and software in the engineering curriculum; a new role for the life sciences in the engineering curriculum; more instruction in law and business for engineering students; a different mix between production and service orientation in the engineering curriculum; and an international component as part of the standard experience of engineering students.

About the Speaker

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Moshe Kam is an engineering educator serving at present as the Robert G. Quinn Professor and Department Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University. In 2011 he serves concurrently as the 49th President and CEO of IEEE . Earlier he was IEEE ’s Vice President for Educational Activities (2003-2005) and IEEE ’s Representative Director to the accreditation body ABET . Kam is known for his studies of decision fusion and distributed detection, which focus on computationally feasible fusion rules for multi-sensor systems. He holds B.S. (Tel Aviv University, 1976), M.S. and Ph.D (Drexel University, 1985, 1987) degrees, and has authored or co-authored over 150 publications on detection and estimation, decision fusion and distributed detection, robot navigation and data mining.

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