Engineering Education in the IT age
Engineering Education in the IT age
(OP)
I want to know the opinions of other people about the change of Engineering Education in the IT age. I think that there is a major change has been done in the way we teach and learn engineering in the last ten years. The existence of the Internet made an important role in the modification of the way we teach.
I want your comments on that.
I want your comments on that.





RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Regards,
Mike
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I got my MSEE from Georgia Tech through a distance learning program in 1996-2000.
I never sat foot on campus, but watched the lectures by video and did the same homework, projects, and took the same exams (proctored locally).
There's a lot of coordination involved in that effort, and email helped make it mcuh more manageable.
I can contract that to my BSEE degree taken approx 13 years before 1983-1987.
It seems there was a much bigger emphasis on numerical solutions (computer simulations, finite element etc) in my second degree in the 1990's than I got when studying in the 80's. Maybe that's a trend?
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RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Don't understand. You cannot gain experience in isolation. You can become familiar with contemporary software products (I recall a pretty neat 6502 assembler in my student days) but you can't assume that today's students are learning tomorrow's tools.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Do students today lose the deeper subject understanding gained by traditional methods due to a reliance on software which can do lots of calculations quickly but hide the working from the user?
A toughy, and in my opinion knowing the fundamentals is more important than being able to do lots of numerical solutions quickly. If you dont know the fundamentals how do you check the output.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
There are a lot of 100% distance programs these days, both bachelors and masters. The field has expanded substantially in the last 3-4 years.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Research and online collaboration are much easier now than in the dinosaur days when I was a student. The schools are understanding the importance of turning out a grad that has the ability not only to design the bridge, but explain it to a client, a regulator, the public.
With all the basics that a civil engineer needs these days, it is extremely difficult to cram it into 4 years. You need an advanced degree to obtain education in your specialization.
IT has given students more to learn, not less.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
"IT has given students more to learn, not less."
Star for you. It comes down to how IT is worked into the curriculum. I think it would be best for course to steer clear of all analysis packages and other software aids until the fundamental concepts have been taught and understood.
It took me several semesters of college calculus to undo the damage done to my maths skills in high school by me TI-89 calculator! And I am still recovering from the damage that Mathematica did to my understanding of diffential equations.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Unless you can perform a given analysis by hand (or at least a good approximation to it) then you should not be using a computer to do it.
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Absolutely they do. I've seen the degradation in engineers I've worked with since 1980 to today. I use computers all the time so I'm not all that enamoured with hand calculations but I have to say that I think the education that engineers get via work experience is definitely stunted by the computer.
When you do anything by hand - sketch, draw, calculate, there is a sort of mental intimacy that occurs with what you are doing and you have to understand everything you calculate.
If you hand a young engineer a spreadsheet or other program that does the calcs in shorter time, they absolutely do not develop a deep understanding of the nuances of the code, calcs or design process.
The computer speed can help you get a quicker feel for the effect various parameters have on an analysis or design - but you don't learn the guts of what you are actually calculating any faster.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I don't think the human species has changed much in 10 years. The way people learn 30 years ago is still pretty much the same as people do today. Evolution takes time.
Computers are great. I am all for them. They are a tool. They are not a god. Just because you use computers now in school does not mean that you are getting a better education than someone 30 years ago before most universities had computers.
Or put it another way. Having a computer will not make you into an Einstein or Da Vinci.
Yes, you can crunch problems much faster with a computer than without. Have you thought about the possibility that if you had to do it by hand, you would be more likely to find shortcuts and approximations? Just a thought.
Unlike some of my peers, I am not a Luddite or Amish. I think technology is wonderful. I don't think technology is the holy grail. A tool in the hand of a master is great. A tool in the hand of an apprentice sometimes don't work.
I graduated many years ago. I recently took a course, and yes, the computer was of great help. Actually, the PDF files are of a great help (the weight of my bag is greatly reduced). The instructor was half my age, as were most of the other students. However, as far as I can tell, I still learned the same way I did 30 years ago. And, as far as I can tell, so did all the other people in the class. The learning was the same. The packaging was definitely different.
Different? Yes. Better? Pretty much a wash.
"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
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RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I was too late for the slide rules, but wish I'd learned how to use one. I graded papers, statics and circuits, and saw way too many examples of work by students who didn't have enough understanding of the problem to actually solve it and know if they had a reasonable result, an analysis that the slide rule would have forced. I also saw too much reliance on "if the calculator shows it, it must be right". The answer in the back of the book isn't always correct and more than once I saw problems where if the student would have merely written the result of the final calculation they wrote on the paper they would have correctly solved the problem, but instead they wrote down the answer from the back of the book.
Punch cards required much greater thought and analysis of the programming problem than is necessary when the program editor points out all the syntax errors as you create them.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Especially since neither Einstein or Da Vinci had a high powered lap top computer in their study.
Hmmm... an interesting thought experiment... if Einstein or Da Vinci had a laptop loaded with some modern engineering tools would they have accomplished something even grander, or would it have sapped all the imagination and creativity out of them.
I suppose it could go either way....
-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
You cant say in the middle of a meeting that you need 20 minutes to load up your laptop and input the data, if you can do back of envelope calculations to estimate sizes then this makes you much more efficient.
Computers also make things more complicated as you often have to put every load case in and model things exactly. If you do the same thing by hand you can often instinctively pick the worst case for each member as you design it.
I have intentionally focused on the negative, but I agree there are many positives.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
For example, a popular electric circuits textbook uses radians for the frequency argument and degrees for the phase shift argument in sinusoids. I still laugh when I think of the student who entered the data provided into his calculator without reconciling to a consistent system of units! His graph looked nothing like the picture in the book. I wonder why?
I appreciate the use of computers in engineering for system modeling, tedious calculations, their graphical output capabilities, and for iterative analyses - and so do my students. It will be difficult to function in the workplace without computer literacy.
I will not let my students become dependent on them, however. I remind them that there really is only one brain behind the solution to the problem - their own - and that they have to understand what they're doing, the limitations that are inherent in the tools and techniques they are using, and the concepts they are applying.
xnuke
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RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
If engineers can't perform their work in the absence of computer programs or calculators, they are not truly engineers.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Having said that there are certainly programs around that would increase the rate of understanding of problems.
If you have ever seen the demo version of Working Model 2D it could reinforce and expand the book-learning of a dynamics student much faster than a lab can, although the lab is still compulsory.
htt
I use an equivalent 3D program to this all the time - I am very cynical about the 'canned' models, but building a mechanism up from basics is very eductaional.
But as an engineer you still need to understand spring/mass/damper systems, you still need to be able to write the equations down, playing with virtual Erector sets is fine for learning but hard to justify to a client. (Well, sometimes I get jobs like that!).
Similarly - who has learned more about structures - the one that has handsolved a uniformly loaded beam on 3 pinned supports, or someone who loads the geomerty into an FEA program and hits the 'solve' button?
Cheers
Greg Locock
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RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
As far as ABET accredidation, I am pretty sure that it does not apply to graduate engineering programs, only undergraduate engineering programs. The relevant question to ask of a graduate school is whether their undergrad program in the same area is accredited. (Georgia Tech has an accredited undergrad engineering program.)
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RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
It's how their use is encouraged.
I would encourage students to exploit to the maximum extent practicable the computer for writing papers.
As far as engineering goes, though, teachers should only accept hand-written homework, tests, and lab notes (I'd require type-written lab reports later on, though).
There's no need to learn, for example, structural analysis software packages in college as a) they should take about a week to learn, and b) they're used for analysis of problems that cannot be solved by hand in a timely manner. I mean, would you assign a full building structural frame problem for homework? No. Just give 'em a 2d problem that can be solved, at most, in a couple of hours. Same goes especially for trusses.
Over-emphasizing computers in engineering school will only breed generations of appliance users. If they want the answers, let 'em go to the library and read a bunch more books.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Every new job I interview for they ask me can you use 'X' software package. Once you take that week to get used to the first one you can pick up most of the others and use them within a couple of hours.
Do you think accountants get taught how to use accounting software in their degrees?
Learning how to program spreadsheets e.t.c. is a valuable tool that may save you hours of iterative work, but there is no need to teach proprietary packages.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Year 1: All hand calculations and theory. Only physical labs.
Year 2: Add Programming language like C and Matlab.
Year 3: Same.
Year 4: Intoduce students to commercial packages in specific course (i.e. Cadence in a transistor level design course)
Graduate: Appropriate at this level to use commercial packages for design.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I would like to add that basic engineering needs to be taught in the same fashion as it has been for many years and hand calculations need to be done by hand so the people can get the feeling for the basic engineering laws, trends and numbers.
Once basic engineering knowledge is acquired, then computer tools and IT can help speed up the rest of the engineering basic course work.
In summary, basics stay basics and there should be a good mix and careful introduction of the computer tools in the engineering learing process.
Otherwise, people coming out from engineering schools will end up relying too much on computer tools and IT technology without knowing what to expect and what the outcome is.
Software is nice, but there are lots of bugs that need to be taken care of and validations done before one can trust the output numbers for the given input values.
Thanks,
Gordan Feric, PE
Engineering Software
http://members.aol.com/engware
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
You almost have to have a better understanding of how to solve problems to use a computer tool to solve it (as long as it isn't a program someone else created) because it will never work right the first time, and you have to find your mistake (figuring out which cell on a spreadsheet is wrong can be more difficult than finding a mistake on paper.)
From what I could tell, not much has changed in what we learn. I think the dependence on computer models must come after school, though I haven't used any programs other than Excel and AutoCAD. (I learned drafting by hand in high school, so I wouldn't say I'm totally dependent on AutoCAD.)
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Computers can be great resources as long as they are taught to be used as resources and not as a crutch.
Cheers,
Kat
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
It is my understanding that a school can have EITHER a B.S. program accredited OR a M.S. program, but not both. I don't know of too many schools who have an accredited M.S. as that would mean the B.S. can't be accredited.
Please correct me if this is inaccurate.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I graduated at the end of the 90s. While we were introduced to them we didn't do any actual FEA or CFD work as part of the main course, I think people doing certain projects etc may have but it would have been the minority.
We did have 2 computing modules learning C. We used computers in various labs but mostly as a back up to hand methods. The once exception was our brief drawing class which was all CAD, if Autosketch counts as CAD!
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I didn't mean that a school can't have a B.S. and a M.S. program (most do). I am pretty certain, however, that only one of the programs can be accredited by ABET.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Not my alma mater.
You can get your bachelor's as credit towards PEng or you can receive your undergraduate in Chemistry, Physics, etc. and go for your master's in engineering and also receive credit towards your PEng.
It was funny watching the BSc majors in my master's courses struggle with the jargon/lingo used by the rest of us....
Today is gone. Today was fun.
Tomorrow is another one.
Every day, from here to there,
funny things are everywhere.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I am not talking about counting as time toward the PE (that is a licensure issue taken up by individual states). I am talking about ABET accreditation. Typically, ABET does not accredit a graduate program unless the school has no undergraduate program. The undergraduate ABET accredited program is the only one that matters in terms of licensure (in most, if not all, states).
I have never seen any requirement for a graduate program to be accredited to count as time toward the PE.
That being said, my initial response to sms asking if you have to be "on campus" at least some time to get an "accredited" graduate degree was that most graduate programs are not ABET accredited anyway.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I don't know of your juridiction but in mine you have to have recevieved a degree from an ABET accredited institute in order to qualify for licensure.....or prove a long long history of industrial experience citing specific use of material taught in a ABET accredited program. (Not recommended)
Today is gone. Today was fun.
Tomorrow is another one.
Every day, from here to there,
funny things are everywhere.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
Only your undergrad degree has to be ABET accredited. A graduate degree does not have to be ABET accredited.
RE: Engineering Education in the IT age
I gave the kid a problem one time that could not be solved by just brute computers, it took some some understanding of the problem and interpertation of the unsolved results of the program. This time the help desk told him to set the iterations to 10000 and go to lunch. 1 hour later no results. Oh, well he was a rising star in the company because he had done so well in the past, I let him alone, he'll cost the company a bundle someday, it's the only way he and his boss will learn.....