ENGINEERING DESIGN COMPETENCY: PERCEIVED BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION

The NSERC Chairs in Design Engineering have developed a white paper on Engineering Design Competency. The Engineering Design Competency document was created to stimulate activity in engineering schools and provide a recommended knowledge and skills guideline for engineering educators. However, engineering schools and individual faculty face a number of barriers in their efforts to excel in engineering design education. To make progress, these barriers must be recognized and understood. This paper will provide a brief review and discussion of five leading barriers to the advancement of engineering design education. The barriers covered are: tenure and promotion policies and procedures, hiring practices, academic structure, funding, and facilities. These barriers are mutually supportive which compounds the challenge. The paper and presentation will also provide some examples of best practices in overcoming these barriers. The goal of these examples is to provide evidence that none of these barriers are absolute, that all can be overcome, and that some engineering schools are succeeding.

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