Some Frontiers for Engineering Education

Journal of Engineering Education, Jul 2004 by Barnes, Frank S

I. INTRODUCTION

The awarding of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for innovations in engineering education by the National Academy of Engineering to the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado provides an opportunity to reflect on the features of the program that made it unique. It also provides a perspective for viewing some new frontiers in engineering education.

The Master's Degree Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the University of Colorado was founded in 1971 as a joint effort between the electrical engineering, political science, business and sociology departments. It has evolved to include more than twenty courses including the fundamentals of communications systems, data communications, wireless, optical fibers, computing, law and policy, standards and economics. This program has graduated more than 2,000 students and serves as a partial model for programs in many other universities. After more than thirty years of experience, it is perhaps useful to reflect on what has been learned in teaching this interdisciplinary program and how the experience can be used to improve other programs in engineering. The following observations seem particularly relevant to some of the issues that face engineering education today.

II. FOUR OBSERVATIONS

First, political and governmental decisions have a great deal to do with the environment that graduates are going to work in and the kind of research and educational programs that can be offered on campus. It is rare that students have any exposure to how these decisions are made or the background that leads to them. For example, the history of the telephone and how it went from a monopoly based on Bell's patent, to free enterprise with cut-throat competition, to a regulated monopoly and back to partially regulated free enterprise is outside the background of most electrical engineering graduates. This is true even though this history has a major impact on a significant fraction of the job market in which they will be applying to work. The graduates of the ITP program have demonstrated on multiple occasions that knowledge of this type has helped them get promotions and take leadership positions in the operation and planning of communications system for both system suppliers and users that would not otherwise have been open to them.

I believe that similar backgrounds will be of value to graduates in other engineering fields. For example, civil engineers need to work with multiple government bodies in the planning, design and operation of water, sewer and highway systems. Other areas with related problems include power systems, biotechnology and aerospace. Students are also lacking courses in other areas that include both technical and social science elements. Classes on risk analysis, security, the control of large distributed systems, life cycle design and technological and demographic forecasting could include technical, legal and economic aspects. Much of engineering is at the interface between science and society and in general a better job has been done in providing a background in science and technology than in the structure of the rest of society and its needs.

Second, where ITP has had much success is in providing a usefill technical background to students at the M.S. level who did not take science or engineering as undergraduates. There are many bright students who did not foresee the need to take mathematics, science, or engineering at age seventeen and who have later discovered that they need some technical background to advance their careers. Most of them are not willing or able to go back to school for four years to take a second bachelor's degree. However, with four or five courses, algebra and some calculus they can learn a large part of what they need to know for systems planning and operation. These students also often have communication and management skills that the typical engineering undergraduates do not have. The Masters ITP program has made it possible for many students with this kind of a background to get jobs that would not otherwise have been open to them and to enjoy very successful careers. This is a market that I believe engineering schools should explore and take a leadership role in developing.

Third, telecommunications is a technology that can both extend the reach of our school to serve a much broader population and serve as a tool that provides significant opportunities to improve the quality of the programs that we can offer our on-campus students. Exporting courses can raise enrollments to enable a school to teach more specialized courses than the economics of the local enrollment would allow. Many schools have done this for some time. However, few schools have found a way to import courses into the mainstream of their program. There are many administrative reasons as to why this is so, such as who pays the distant professor, what will be the tuition, what happens with transfer credits and how does the professor get credit for promotion and tenure for teaching distant students at another school? However, no school can hire the faculty it would like to have or teach all the topics it would like to offer with the highest level of expertise. Modern communications now gives us the capability of bringing in courses from anywhere in the world and those who solve the administrative problems have an opportunity to strengthen the programs they can offer their students in ways that have not been possible in the past. This is an example where the technical problems are much easier to solve than the social and organizational problems. However, the rewards for those who solve them could be very large.