Engineering Education: Prospective Research Issues

There exists an increasing gap between engineering developments and research on educating engineers. There is a need to investigate and develop pedagogical means for advancing engineering education. The problem stems from the fact that most engineering educators are concerned mainly with disciplinary engineering contents, while researchers in the educational domain concentrate on educational psychology and pedagogical aspects. There is not enough cooperation between engineering and education, thus avoiding the creation of synergetic interaction between the two domains in a given engineering education system or situation. This article deals with the question: what has to be investigated in engineering education in order to advance learning activities of students and updating engineers? We will analyze some issues, as they aroused during recent years in a series of research studies on engineering education around the world and in the Department of Education in Technology and Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. After analyzing the status of engineering education and emergence of relevant R&D activities, possible research questions are presented. For example: (1) How should the contents of an engineering curriculum be determined? By whom? (2) Is there a need for a recognized educational scholarship like that of the existing disciplinary scholarship? (3) Creativity and project work – what do engineering educators and students think about? (4) What are the conditions and means for advancing the learning process in a multimedia environment? (5) What are the pitfalls in using hypermedia during the learning process? (6) What is Self-Learning Regulation (SLR) and why is it an important issue in engineering education? Accordingly possible trends in engineering education research are proposed and discussed.