The Education Advancement Project In Taiwan: Reap On Precision Mechatronics

Anticipating the engineer demands due to the quick development of the hi-tech industries in Taiwan, the Ministry of Education (MOE) has initiated the ‘The Research and Education Advancement Project’ (REAP) to assure both quantity and quality of the manpower can meet the needs. The major goal is to re-arrange the educational resources in such a way that they can be more efficiently used while the quality of graduates can be further raised. Firstly, several socalled the “strategic industries” are identified depending on the country’s economy plans. In the mean time, the programs that matching with those strategic industries are initiated one after another by MOE. Unlike the traditional educational programs, the REAP emphasizes the interuniversity collaborations. Among these many capstone programs in REAP, the precision mechatronics program, started in 1997, includes the most important, comprehensive and fundamental technologies for industries. Major achievements of the program include establishment of the expertise laboratories, the educational resource integration and outcomes sharing, the e-education, the hands-on project competitions and the community service. In addition, the program also encourages the communities to organize the academy-industry alliances (AIA). During year 2001 to 2004, ten educational alliances, directed by the educational resource centers (ERC), were formed in the past four years with more than 78 academic and 25 industrial partners participated. Moreover, about 54 expertise laboratories are established together with accompanying courses and lecture materials. The outcomes and facilities of the each ERC, such as lab instruments and course materials, are shared among partners in each expertise alliance. In addition, the program has designed the hands-on competitions to upgrading the practical hands-on ability of engineering students. The competition is now an international event. It is worthy to mention that the competition uses the real-time video via internet and the carefully designed schedule to avoid the time zone differences. As the conclusions, the outcomes of the program have shown that such a cluster-based expertise community is an efficient approach to integrate and to share the educational resources, especially for hi-tech engineering educations. What the program has achieved is difficult through the traditional engineering departments. However, it has been also observed that the bandwidth of the network can be a critical factor to this new education model.