There is strong interest in broadening engineering education, bringing in more liberal arts content as well as additional subjects such as economics, business and law, with which engineers now have to be familiar. There are also cogent arguments for balancing against what is now the almost exclusively quantitative nature of the curriculum, adding…

The contemporary situation in the Baltic region, namely, the lack of working places due to the structural problems, a high unemployment rate, the migration of highly qualified people and the low rate of self-employees, demands on innovation as an engine of the economic development with a strong impact on sustainable development in the European…

Enterprise 3.0 offers potential solutions for the quality, maintenance and sustainable development of services. The synergy between Enterprise 3.0 and engineering education advances the development of innovative products, processes and services in the European economy. Aim of the research is to analyze student engineers' use of Enterprise 3.0…

The range of rationales that underpin conceptions of flexible education, and the re-making over time of the official meaning of flexibility in national education policy, have led to the point where flexibility might be found, or be required, in nearly every aspect of Australian higher education. This paper seeks to identify those rationales and…

Debates about school science, students' engagement with, and participation in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), and the supply of suitably qualified people for STEM related fields have been ongoing in England since the early 20th Century. Recent key policy documents and STEM related organisations have highlighted a skills gap…

In this study, dysfunctional cooperative learning teams are identified by comparing the Taguchi "larger-the-better" quality index for the academic achievement of students in a cooperative learning condition with that of students in an individualistic learning condition. In performing the experiments, 42 sophomore mechanical engineering…

Hands-on practical work in physics and engineering has a long and well-established tradition in Australian universities. Recently, however, the question of whether hands-on physics and engineering practicals are useful for engineering students and whether they could be deleted or whether these could be replaced with computer simulations has been…

Engineering curricula have expanded in recent decades. In addition to science and technical engineering, they now include several non-technical competencies. This is a trend reinforced by programme accreditation. The authors take the viewpoint that it is important to ensure that graduates have the competencies they will require for their work. The…

This paper suggests a pedagogical approach to teaching the subject of average modeling of PWM switch-mode power electronics systems through simulation by general-purpose electronic circuit simulators. The paper discusses the derivation of PSPICE/ORCAD-compatible average models of the switch-mode power stages, their software implementation, and…

Purpose: The design, construction and deployment of a large virtual campus are a complex issue. Present virtual campuses are made of several software applications that complement e-learning platforms. In order to develop and maintain such virtual campuses, a complex software engineering infrastructure is needed. This paper aims to analyse the…

This paper summarizes progress on two related lines of chemical engineering education research: 1) identifying persistent student misconceptions in thermal and transport science (fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics); and, 2) developing a method to help students repair these misconceptions. Progress on developing the Thermal and…

Technology and engineering education is destined to become the most important subject in future education. This is inevitable when people live in a society that needs and uses technology at the pace seen today. Branding is personal, involves a commitment, and requires dedication to a belief and the enthusiasm to work in a logical manner to gain…

The paper proposes lab work and student competitions based on the LEGO NXT Mindstorms kits and standard LabVIEW. The goal of this combination is to stimulate design and experimentation with real hardware and representative software in courses where mobile robotics is adopted as a motivating platform to introduce mechatronics competencies. Basic…

Outsourcing is seen from various points of views by individuals in different industries. When it comes to educating science and technology students, and for that matter, students of any discipline, up until recently, outsourcing was not a possibility. With the recent advances in computer and network technology, it is now possible to teach a live…

The validity of speech act data taken from different kinds of elicitation instruments has been widely discussed in interlangauge and cross cultural pragmatics literature. In this study an attempt is made to evaluate and investigate data taken from two of the most popular speech act instruments namely, written DCT and closed role play. The…