Future directions for mechanical, manufacturing, and industrial engineering technology programs

Journal of Engineering Technology, Spring 2002 by Mott, Robert L, Neff, Gregory P, Stratton, Mark J, Summers, Donna C S

special focus

ET education strives to produce graduates who are ready to perform at a high level immediately after receiving their degrees and who can achieve strong professional growth throughout their careers.

Introduction

In keeping with the theme of this special issue of the Journal of Engineering Technology, this article presents viewpoints on the fields of Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET), Manufacturing Engineering Technology (MfgET), and Industrial Engineering Technology (lET). While highly knowledgeable in their own right, each author sought input from colleagues to gain a broad perspective of this topic. Each section in the paper begins with an overview of innovations in these fields, covering both technical and educational issues. Future directions for educational programs are then explored, considering industry needs, curriculum design, laboratory experiences, pedagogy, accreditation, and interfaces with other fields. The authors are confident that the ideas presented here will promote strong, positive change in engineering technology (ET) education.

The Future of MET

INNOVATIONS

Nanotechnology and Biotechnology

Future innovative subject matter areas in mechanical engineering include nanotechnology and biotechnology. As these areas develop, ET programs will be among the first to offer courses in the new technologies. Why? The answer is to contribute to their application and implementation and to attract student enrollment. Although engineering faculty members have done much of the research to develop the technologies, new MET faculty members bring recent industrial experience that is equally useful.

Who has identified nanotechnology and biotechnology as emerging areas? The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) sponsored a keynote panel along with sixteen other nanotechnology sessions at the annual International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition in November 2001. For its 2002 biannual educator's conference Re-defining Mechanical Engineering and its Impact on Engineering Education, ASME's Council on Education asserts "The bounds and interfaces of Mechanical Engineering are increasingly expanding the discipline in ways that will be blurring it with other traditional disciplines and continuing to create new technologies, particularly in very small scale and biological applications."I

Energy Independence and Environmental Issues

Alternate energy technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells, electric or hybrid-powered vehicles, and stationary solar and wind power systems will be attractive issues to future MET students as they confront domestic waste and global pressure on resource supplies.

Harnessing Increasing Computing Power to Succeed in a Global Economy

A major issue facing engineers and technologists involves the global economy. Basic, labor-intensive manufacturing largely has moved to the lowest bidder, usually China. To maintain a high standard of living, the United States (as well as Western Europe) must continue to perform research and find more complicated products to manufacture. American manufacturers do well with highly complex products such as jet engines, aircraft, and pacemakers. Nanotechnology and biotechnology will fall in this area as well. As U.S. researchers develop complex applications of technology, technicians and technologists must react quickly and determine how to test, sell, manufacture, and service these technologies economically.

Thanks to computer costs decreasing by about one-half every eighteen months, industry can harness increasing computer power to compete globally.2 In general, MET programs are doing a good job of supplying graduates with practical experience in computer applications, partly because of the program's strong base in traditional manufacturing processes. In the future, MET programs will move more toward design given the movement of basic manufacturing to other countries and the increasing capabilities and decreasing costs of solid modeling, kinematic analysis, and finite element analysis systems.

Additionally, cultural issues and intercultural communication are becoming more important in industry because of globalization. MET graduates increasingly will find themselves working in multicultural teams over long distances with design and manufacturing centers on different continents. FuTuRE DIRECTIONS FOR MET PRoGRAms

Distance Learning

MET education is expensive to deliver due largely to expensive laboratory equipment, limited laboratory class sizes, and lack of available graduate student teaching assistants. Declining enrollment in engineering and MET programs tends to decrease class sizes, thereby raising the cost per student. Distance learning appears to substantially increase enrollment in classes where it has been employed. However, implementing the laboratory portion of distance-- based MET courses has been problematic.

Several approaches to laboratory delivery in MET distance education are notable. The first method is employed at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where lecture and homework are delivered through videotapes, telephone, and the Internet. Trusted proctors administer tests locally. Labs are conducted either on a single Saturday for the entire course or on a single long weekend. This method, allows students, whether local or not, to complete labs with a single trip to the Rochester campus.3 The MET faculty at Old Dominion University have utilized a mobile laboratory in a bus to deliver the laboratory experience to the student.4 A similar suggestion is to construct small, portable laboratories that can be shipped to students. Faculty have also experimented with CD-ROMS that show students performing labs and with live, remote-control laboratory experiments delivered over the Internet.5