Educating Engineering Educators to Nurture 21st Century Indian Engineers

An educational institution is defined by its faculty; student intake and infrastructure are largely dependent on the faculty. Any educational system, therefore, has to focus on educating the faculty on an ongoing basis. While ample research has been reported on the requirements of the 21 st century engineers, its deployment is not satisfactory, especially in the Indian engineering education system. This has to be addressed as India is endowed with impressive demographic dividend, as compared to many developed economies and is poised to become a major workforce supplier in the coming decades. Being of Indian origin with international experience, we have designed, developed and delivered a two-day workshop for educating the educators in the emerging Indian economy. The objectives of the workshop were a) to introduce the participants to the changing needs of engineering education, and b) to illustrate an approach that we have developed over the past decade to address the needs. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the workshop. The context of the workshop is set by Richard Riley’s beautifully articulated statement: “we are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist using technologies that haven’t been invented in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet”. While we cannot list technologies and problems; we can envision some basic themes around which the future may revolve. To enable a focused discussion of topics, we imagine a future in which individuals are empowered to participate in the global value network where geographically distributed people (including engineers) collaboratively develop, build, and test solutions to complex socio-technoeco problems in wired and interconnected world. We posit that to be successful in the future, our engineering students need to be empowered to develop white-space competencies and learn to realize sustainable engineering systems. The workshop was designed to be highly interactive. We used a model course developed over the past 15 years, which embodies threshold concepts such as the ‘question for the semester’ (Q4S), self-evaluation and learning communities, relying on developing competencies to fulfill the learning objectives, etc. The model course embedded all the concepts espoused in the workshop. The approach was based on the principles from mass customization and competency-based learning rather than one-size-fits-all content delivery. The workshop started with identifying competencies and meta-competencies required for the 21 st century Indian engineers. Methods for identifying white-space competencies, dilemmas and managing them were discussed. The participants discussed many issues such as developing the Q4S for educating the 21 st century Indian engineer and concluded with the course that they would like to develop with the concepts learnt in the workshop. The participant pool consisted of 32 Indian educators from different parts of the country. The workshop received positive feedback and the participants went back with a resolve to deploy the knowledge that they acquired at least in a course. The paper includes the design, implementation, and key learning of the authors from the workshop. 1 Frame of Reference: Educating 21 Century Indian Engineers 1.1 Indian Engineering Education System – Current Status and Needs The Indian engineering education system is one of the largest and most relevant global systems where around 3400 colleges turn out over a million engineers every year 1 . The country has emerged as a major player in the global arena and has produced engineers who have contributed significantly to the economic and technological development at international levels. These contributions have been made not only in the information technology sector – as is largely perceived – but also in various engineering disciplines and in hi-tech research and development in automotive, telecommunication, healthcare, solid-state electronics, communications and embedded systems sectors. The Indian engineering education system has tremendous potential and national value. Cognizing this, the government and the business community are showing a strong commitment to improving the system. It is complemented by an equally strong interest from the youth and their parents. The interest and support has been creating a virtuous spiral resulting in the stronger system. The spiral can grow up much rapidly. There has been increasing globalization of suppliers, workforce and customers all around the world. India, due to her rich demographic dividend and the promising education system, is seen as an important contributor to the intellectual capital of the world. The requisite steps must be taken to fulfill the potential. As of now, the education system appears to have some inadequacies to fulfill those requirements. There is a lack of academic rigor and focus on fundamentals. It is also seen as more theoretical and lacking stronger connections with the world of applications. It requires students to complete 180-200 credits as compared to other systems requiring 120-130 credits. The heavy curriculum takes its toll on developing a deeper approach and encourages a cursory or examination oriented approach. More important, it suffers due to the paucity of qualified faculty. Currently, the shortfall is estimated to be 40% 2 . In addition, if we count qualified and motivated faculty, the number may be far higher. While the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) standard norms require faculty members to have a Ph.D. qualification; only some members fulfill that condition. The quality of those research scholars also may not be up to the mark. We strongly believe that completing Ph.D. itself is not a sufficient condition for an engineering teacher. A good research scholar can be a good researcher, but he may not be a good teacher. Neither regulatory bodies nor the engineering colleges’ leadership requires teachers having any exposure to theory and practices of education domain. This impacts performance of faculty and overall college education, and perhaps results in mushrooming of private tuition classes that have short term focus and examination orientation. It is estimated that the overall private tuition market’s annual turnover is double than the budget for education in the ongoing five year plan. All this is resulting in stooping down of the estimated employability of graduate engineers to only 25% 3 . Meantime the global demands from engineering graduates are changing. The expectations from 21st century engineers are moving beyond outcomes and attributes to the traits, motives and self–concept 4 . The Indian engineering education system, therefore, has to not only work on the backlog but also catch up with the global trends and that too very fast. It can achieve this by focusing on development of the most critical aspect of the education system, namely, faculty. 1.2 Rapid Changes in the Job Markets Rapid globalization has led to many unprecedented changes in the world in which our students and graduates will practice. According to Friedman 5 , “Globalization has collapsed time and distance and raised the notion that someone anywhere on earth can do your job, more cheaply”. In his book, Friedman 5 gives a number of examples of jobs that are being outsourced from developed countries such as the United States to emerging economies such as India and China. The new jobs created in India through outsourcing created a significant demand for personnel with a unique set of skills, such as the ability to collaborate in global settings, ability to work in geographically distributed teams, and ability to work with individuals from different nationalities in different time-zones. Nearly a decade has passed since Friedman wrote his book “The world is flat”. Within the past decade, the labor costs in India have steadily increased 6 . According to Chandramouli 7 , the increase in salaries was between 12-27% during FY2012. Such changes are expected to further result in changes in the kinds of skills required by the Indian workforce over the next decade or so. Realizing how much the business environment has changed over the past two decades, it is apparent there is a need to change the way Indian engineers are educated. Drastic changes in the educational system cannot be made without faculty members who understand and appreciate the need for such changes. Hence, our goal was to create a workshop where Indian educators were invited to participate. Within the workshop, our objectives were to: a) introduce the participants to the changing needs of engineering education, and b) illustrate an approach that we have developed over the past decade to address the needs. The workshop was widely publicized. We received the required 50 nominations in a few weeks’ time. Out of them 74% were from the host institute (College of Engineering, Pune) and 26% from other institutions across India. Finally, 32 participants could attend the workshop with 69% from the host and 31% from other institutes. The faculty members were from various departments and had broad experience. 1.3 Competencies Required for the 21 Century Indian Engineer With increasing globalization and 21 st century trends such as the commoditization of technology, individuals are required to refresh and adapt their skills and technical competencies continuously and keep their knowledge current. We have identified the following five categories of metacompetencies necessary for a 21 st century engineer to support innovation 8 . 1. Managing Information: This includes ability to gather, interpret, validate and use information, have an ability to understand quantitative and qualitative information, and to discard useless information. 2. Managing Thinking: This consists of ability to identify and manage dilemmas associated with the realization of complex, sustainable, socio-techno-eco systems, ability to think a