Practical activities are at the core of learning in both engineering and science education programs. Hence, such activities are included as important practical learning experiences in each of these fields. During such learning experiences students are confronted by many different entities, from simple equipment to advanced instrumentation, all of…

This study investigates the question of how Engineering education in the Nordic region responds to the challenge of educating future engineers who are ready for professional practice in a digital world. Particular interest is put on identifying who is responsible for the implementation of digital knowledge and what and how subject content is…

Trust is an important aspect of learning. However, there is little published research on how students perceive its value. In this article, we report on engineering students' perceptions of the role of trust in their learning and their experiences of what teachers do in their courses that builds trust. Nine students participated in semi-structured…

Problem solving in chemical kinetics poses substantial challenges for university students since it often involves significant use of mathematics as a tool and language, with challenging translations and transitions between chemical phenomena and mathematical representations. In this paper, we present key findings from a study investigating…

This study aims to understand how students manage higher technical education and contribute to research on institutional culture, STEM education, and students' educational strategies by identifying patterns of how students navigate within one university's engineering education. To achieve this, we define and use the concept of technical science…

High dropout rates in the first year of undergraduate studies are an expression of the secondary-tertiary transition problem and they seem to be particularly high in those degree programs where specialized mathematics courses are taught in the first year of study. Research shows that students' difficulties during the transition period cannot be…

Classifications of higher education institutions into categories that are more or less clearly differentiated through prestige and status are legion in the world of higher education. The notion of parallel categories with comparable statuses, such as those of different types of universities, is however much less well understood. This paper…

Purpose: The information technology (IT) sector has been seen as central to society's transformation to a more just and sustainable society, which underlines teachers' responsibility to foster engineers who can contribute specifically to such ends. This study aims to report an effort to significantly update an existing engineering programme in IT…

Climate change increases the risk of natural disasters, which requires the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure. This implies a need to enable engineering students to deal with highly complex problems and uncertainty. These competencies refer to the concept of resilience, describing the ability of a system to adapt to threatening…

Background: Research in engineering education has pointed to the need for new engineers to develop a broader skill-set with an emphasis on "softer" social skills. However, there remains strong tensions in the identity work that engineers must engage in to balance the technical demands of the discipline with the new emphasis on…

This article explores how female university students' abilities to present themselves as 'authentic' engineers are imbricated with discursive constructions of gender and gender equality. The empirical data comes from interviews and video diaries collected with three female engineering students. The analysis demonstrates the power of the Swedish…

Background: Given the disparities in gender representation, efforts are needed to make engineering education more inclusive and attractive to young people. It is important that those entering engineering education are making this decision with sufficient understanding of what it means to be an engineer. This study explored how lower secondary…

As more entrepreneurial experiences are integrated into engineering programs, students are faced with new challenges they need help in managing. While previous research has identified entrepreneurial activities that engineering students struggle with, the antecedents of these difficulties have not been directly investigated. Drawing on an…

In this paper, we propose a method to analyse the coherence of existing curricula at higher education institution. We focus our attention to engineering programmes at universities but the proposed method is by no means restricted to those cases. In contrast to other known methods, our approach is quantitative, decentralised, and asynchronous and…

To enable interactive remote education on electrical safety in biomedical engineering, a real-life problem-based laboratory module is proposed, implemented and evaluated. The laboratory module was implemented in a freestanding distance course in hospital safety for three consecutive years and was based on electrical safety for medical devices,…