Bringing Practitioners (And Practice) Into The Curriculum

Many of the Delft University of Technology curricula have a rich history of bringing practice into the classroom. The most common and most obvious way that this is done in Delft is to seek candidates for full professorships almost universally from industry as opposed to having them progress ‘up through the ranks’ as is most common in US universities. Realizing that most US universities will not change their ways so drastically, the paper describes and analyzes experiences with several other and less far-reaching ways in which industrial guests has been brought into Delft University of Technology curricula: 1. Provide a single lecture period as part of a course. 2. Provide specific expertise for a course exercise. 3. Teach an entire course. 4. Coach a thesis along with university staff. 5. Participate as quasi-student in university-taught classes. Experiences with each of these will be described, but more importantly, lessons learned from the experiences and the methodology for improvement of the utilization of industrial practitioners with students will also be highlighted. All of this work has taken place over the last quarter century with a significant increase in this activity in the most recent decade.