While the fourth industrial revolution continues to change manufacturing enterprises all over the world, not all enabling key technologies are taught sufficiently at universities. For this purpose, a new lecture at the Montanuniversität Leoben was designed, teaching students of miscellaneous engineering disciplines, the fundamentals of…

The competence to work together and co-create with others outside one's own scientific domain, culture or professional practice is a critical competence for engineers to respond to global challenges. In this context, boundary crossing (BC) competence is crucial. We reflect on a university-wide participatory action research educational innovation…

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…

In times of rapid transformation of society in general and domains of technology in particular, questions are raised on how to effectively organise higher engineering education. As a response, this study examines the curriculum composition of eleven engineering programs to investigate curriculum nativeness, a novel approach for assessing…

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…

In general engineering studies focus on the technical skills in their own discipline. However, in their subsequent industrial careers, a significant portion of their time needs to be devoted to non-technical skills. In addition, in an increasingly globalised world collaboration in teams across cultures and disciplines is paramount to the creation…

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…

Emissions reductions targets for the UK set out in the Climate Change Act for the period to 2050 will only be achieved with significant changes to the built environment, which is currently estimated to account for 50% of the UK's carbon emissions. The socio-technological nature of Civil Engineering means that this field is uniquely placed to lead…

Product design is the convergence point for engineering and design thinking and practices. Until recently, product design has been taught either as a component of mechanical engineering or as a subject within design schools but increasingly there is global recognition of the need for greater synergies between industrial design and engineering…

Described is an integrated framework used to teach engineering, creativity, and management that emulates the working environment of a modern and dynamic engineering organization. This is done through the use of case studies. (KR)