The Global Engineering College: Lessons Learned In Exploring A New Model For International Engineering Education

The increasing globalization of corporate economies has changed the face of engineering practice. In addition to core engineering skills, modern engineers must possess cross-cultural communication skills, team management skills, and the ability to perform on geographicallydistributed teams. In a 2003 ASEE paper 5 , we described a novel curricular paradigm called the Global Engineering College (GEC), based on the idea of seamlessly combining the curricula and educational opportunities of several internationally-distributed engineering institutions to create a virtual engineering college spanning multiple countries and cultures. In this paper, we report on our experiences piloting the key elements of this model under an NSF planning grant, focusing on the obstacles encountered, and solutions developed to address them.