Interdisciplinary engineering programs have many perceived benefits including developing broader skills and an ability to work with complex real-life problems. However, the development of interdisciplinary programs faces many challenges including how to balance breadth and depth, how to integrate interdisciplinary learning into existing studies…

Building Information Modelling (BIM) has changed the way many civil engineers organise and execute their job in recent years. Many universities around the world have been adapting their curricula to include BIM education. However, this adaptation has been incomplete, occurring only in a small number of subjects. To fill this gap, this paper…

Many traditional engineering schools are struggling to balance the calls to provide an innovative engineering education that meet the demands of graduates and their employers with the constraints and momentum of their existing curriculum. In this paper we present the conceptual design behind a framework that integrates existing discipline-specific…

The engineering graduate of today will engage in a career which will span the middle of the twenty-first century, and beyond. They will work in a world which is increasingly more complex and uncertain than at any time before. This will require an integrated combination of technical knowledge and transferable skills and values, to a greater extent…

Reforms in undergraduate engineering curriculum to produce engineers with entrepreneurial skills should address real-world problems relevant to industry and society with active industry support. Technology-assisted, hands-on projects involving experimentation, design simulation and prototyping will transform graduates into professionals with…

Engineering design is known as an answer to an ill-defined problem. As any answer to an ill-defined problem, it can never be completely right or absolutely wrong. The methods that universities use to teach engineering design, as a consequence of this, suffer from the same fate. However, the accumulated experience with the "chalk and…

The authors seek to establish the need for better education to develop procedures useful to evaluate the sustainability of a building. The analysis emphasises the need for education in the social dimension of sustainability assessment in the context of the life cycle of a building and how such education of building agents could increase…

Following the decision at the KU Leuven to implement the educational concept of guided independent learning and to encourage students to participate in scientific research, the Faculty of Bioscience Engineering decided to introduce a bachelor thesis. Competencies, such as communication, scientific research and teamwork, need to be present in the…

It is now widely acknowledged that water management discipline is transforming, from being a public health and flood prevention challenge of the nineteenth century to a multi-dimensional challenge of water security for the twenty-first century. In order to train water engineers to be capable of working with this holistic multi-dimensional…

While experiential learning has been increasingly explored and adopted by higher education institutions, few have researched the appropriate assessment methods that can be aligned with the learning outcomes of experiential learning. A literature review on the diverse forms of assessment currently used for community service types of experiential…

Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino, the top technical universities in Italy, united their efforts in 2004 by launching a unique excellence programme called Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP). The ASP programme is devoted to 150 students, selected each year from among the top 5-10% of those enrolled in the Engineering, Architecture and…

In interdisciplinary or intercultural groups, it is highly important that the members of the group are able to apply and share knowledge across the standard boundaries that exist around disciplines and practices. Often, a lot of effort is required to avoid pitfalls such as misunderstandings, judgemental discussions or just the inability to…

Technology advancement and human needs have led to integration among many engineering disciplines. Mechatronics engineering is an integrated discipline that focuses on the design and analysis of complete engineering systems. These systems include mechanical, electrical, computer and control subsystems. In this paper, the importance of teaching…

In May 2008, the worst earthquake in more than three decades struck southwest China, killing more than 80,000 people. The complexity of this earthquake makes it an ideal case study to clarify the intertwined issues of ethics in engineering and to help cultivate critical thinking skills. This paper first explores the need to encourage engineering…

Most university-level engineering studies produce technically skilled engineers. However, typically students face several difficulties when working in multidisciplinary teams when they initiate their industrial careers. In a globalised world, it becomes increasingly important that engineers are capable of collaborating across disciplinary…