How is engineering education supporting students amid technological advancement?

We depend on technological advances at work and for personal use. However, for engineers, the fast-paced world of technological innovation is often tricky to navigate from a standing start.

Many universities and educational institutions are therefore working hard to transform their modules and courses to be more flexible and adaptable to the world around us. For example, consider how far artificial intelligence (AI) has come in just a few short years.

Therefore, while the core theoretical bases of engineering education will always remain the same, there will always need to be some scalability for students to practice their new skills in an ever-changing world.

In this article, we look at a few ways that engineering courses are already implementing such changes, and how students are already benefiting!

Stepping away from the finer points

While engineering students will always need to learn theory and apply techniques across their studies, educational bodies will likely lean away from hyper-specific areas in their courses. Engineering comes in many different flavors and has scores of applications, so a more generalized approach to education will stand the test of time.

Universities will likely focus on essential engineering skills beyond technical knowledge. For example, are they supporting self-management, teamwork and communication skills? Are they focusing on splitting engineering knowledge and practical aptitude into separate areas, or are they giving equal emphasis to ‘evergreen’ skills and techniques?

While stepping away from the finer points will help to keep courses and modules evergreen, there’s still a need for specific knowledge and theory. Below, we explore how course providers might help to prevent such course modules from aging slower than you would typically expect.

Encouraging practical aptitude alongside providing knowledge

To succeed in any engineering field, you will need a wealth of specialized knowledge. However, there’s a difference between practical and theoretical knowledge!

Universities are swaying more toward practical education to effectively provide students with the skills and tools they need to succeed regardless of the challenges. By providing a broad series of techniques and practical skills that students can apply in multiple situations, they can easily adapt to new software, hardware, and customer or client needs as they arise.

Universities provide the ‘groundwork’ so that graduates can easily build upon practical knowledge to handle new technologies and tasks when they arise. To borrow an idiom, it’s ‘teaching a man to fish’! That man may not have access to all the latest lines or even have the most advanced rod on the market. However, he knows the principles of fishing, understands the basic practices, and can therefore adapt and learn new, more specific skills and techniques when required.

There’s certainly nothing stopping educational bodies from providing crucial theoretical knowledge as part of their modules. To understand how many engineering principles work in practice, it’s vital to have case studies to work from!

For example, those joining the University of Ottawa MEM program will likely find that there’s a reading list and a series of practical resources and studies to follow. The university offers a highly flexible and futureproof series of modules, thanks to its careful balance of the theoretical and the practical.

Emphasizing ‘power skills’

Power skills are human to the core – many will know them well as ‘soft skills’, but the name has changed as they’ve become more pivotal in our ever-changing landscape.

As mentioned, some universities and colleges may drift away from the finer minutiae in engineering principles to ensure that their students have the skills to adapt to ever-changing technology and challenges.

Power skills are crucial in many lines of work, and this certainly applies to all walks of engineering. Important power skills include critical thinking, for example, where an engineer may need to make a snap decision based purely on facts and reasoning. This skill allows them to avoid bias through outside influence or their own preconceptions.

Beyond this, communication is key. While many might assume that communication refers to the simple ability to talk and listen, it goes a little deeper when working with others, especially when approaching engineering challenges.

Effective communicators not only share information and discuss projects in clear detail, but they’re also willing to listen to others, accept their viewpoints and work within teams to solve complex problems. Without clear communication, engineering teams risk developing poor-quality products and severely disappointing end users.

A third example of a power skill that an engineering course will likely lean into is self-management. While engineering can be highly social work where you’re dependent on a chain of command, it can also be highly solitary.

This means that all successful engineers need to work hard on managing their timetables and workloads and motivating themselves even when problems seem near impossible.

By leaning into power skill training, universities and colleges can better prepare future engineers for a raft of varied problems likely to come their way.

As uniquely human skills, these areas are never likely to become obsolete, and engineers can apply the lessons they learn to a near-limitless extent. Power skills are futureproof, and those who excel in them are always ready for the latest technological advances around the corner.

Embracing integration

While there’s no true way to tell where technology will go next, engineering courses may choose to integrate emerging technologies to support their students better.

For example, the emergence of AI, which is swiftly changing several industries at once, is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. If anything, AI is already so deeply integrated into engineering and creative industries that many haven’t yet noticed it.

Therefore, engineering lecturers and course builders with their fingers on the industry pulse(s) will know that blending AI work into modules and coursework will benefit their students.

This isn’t to suggest that the technology they’ll use will always be the standard they expect in the real world. However, gaining some experience of working with AI will put them in a comfortable position to scale up alongside the technology.

It’s also unhealthy for course providers to avoid emerging or evolving technologies outright. This approach is somewhat like burying one’s head in the sand – technology is always changing, and sometimes you’ve got to embrace it.

What’s inadvisable here is designing a whole module or even an entire course around a suite or piece of hardware that won’t last the next decade. Ultimately, course providers and tutors need to prevent their students from having to constantly play ‘catch up’ in the years ahead.

Embracing technological integration goes hand in hand with practical study. Many universities and course leaders will provide their students with access to tools to learn how it works and how it may help to solve unlimited problems in the years to come.

Encouraging innovation

Engineering thrives on innovation, and while much of this can arise through clever use of technology and specific tools, some course leaders may encourage creative, ‘out of the box’ thinking so that students can adapt to new challenges more quickly and easily.

For example, module leaders may ask students to propose creative ways to solve common problems in specific industries without relying on specific hardware or tools. Can they resolve pain points in the automotive industry, for example, simply by condensing current working processes and working with principles alone?

There will come the point where specific software and/or hardware will need to intervene and support the students in question. However, encouraging this type of thinking (without a technological crutch) will better prepare graduates for a more adaptive future.

Again, the burden falls on the college, university or other body to help students develop sustainable skills, not just theoretical and hyper-specific knowledge about tools and practices that will go obsolete.

Innovation is by far one of the most important intellectual tools that an engineer can wield. It’s not necessarily teachable (one could argue), but it can be supported, encouraged and explored.

Adopting multidisciplinary programs

While we’ve explored how engineering students can learn how to become flexible and adaptive, course providers may choose to take a multidisciplinary approach, ensuring that the study materials themselves are highly versatile.

A multidisciplinary approach to engineering study simply means providing students with a variety of options for practical and theoretical learning. For all that engineering is a broad occupation that’s highly specialized from niche to niche, there are always principles that appear common between the different types.

Course providers leaning into the multidisciplinary approach give learners the chance to collaborate with others on different modules. This multifaceted approach allows students to gain a broader perspective of how their skills and knowledge can apply to different areas of engineering.

This means that they are never tied to a specific type of technology or brand of tool. After graduating, they will have the theoretical and practical experience to adapt to a variety of different problems and projects.

It’s a case of ensuring that students receive a ‘little bit of everything’. Sometimes, delivering this isn’t always possible. However, restricting courses certainly puts learners at risk of obsolete technology and outdated practices a few years down the line.

Working with passionate tutors and course leaders

It’s a prerequisite that all tutors and course leaders should have a demonstrable passion for the subjects they teach, not just life or work experience. However, when it comes to technologically dependent areas such as engineering, teachers must keep their fingers on the pulses of the industries they prepare people for.

A tutor who isn’t passionate about engineering, its history and its potential impacts on wider society will be highly unlikely to move away from outdated and unchanged course materials. They’ll simply ‘stick to what they know’, never thinking deeply about embracing change and encouraging students to think for themselves.

Engineering students benefit immensely from course leaders who focus on their power skills. The most effective tutors provide pupils with materials that are adaptable and relevant. They’re not afraid to embrace new tools and systems as part of core learning.

To ensure that their pupils can adapt successfully to future changes in technology, engineering tutors must encourage students to explore their own ideas and creative problem-solving. Tutors who delight in their students’ innovative and creative thinking are more likely to produce graduates who are unafraid to approach new technologies and challenges ahead.

Is engineering education overdue an overhaul?

Many sources suggest that engineering education is in dire need of a ‘rethink’ as technology continues to grow at such a surprising pace. The systems of old, while having proved successful in developing a generation of engineers across multiple disciplines, are not necessarily primed and ready to support the speed at which technology is changing.

Therefore, it’s unsurprising that so many engineering course leaders are leaning more toward practical learning than toward theoretical study. After all, these are transferable and sustainable skills that graduates can use as they emerge into the varied world of engineering.

Does this mean that all engineering education courses will change in similar ways? Not necessarily. What it does mean, however, is that the future engineering courses will likely be more flexible, more focused on power skills, and more ready to embrace emerging technologies.

Above all, any engineering students beginning studies should be ready to adapt and evolve alongside the technology and techniques they use. While much of the burden to beat obsolescence falls to the educational body, students also play their part!

The decades ahead are set to be exciting for engineering students and tutors alike. However, now is certainly the time to start embracing flexibility!