Personalized Engineering Education for the Twenty-First Century

With increasing globalization and twenty-first-century trends such as the personalization and commoditization of technology, individuals are required to refresh and adapt their competencies continuously and keep their knowledge current. The changing environment and the diverse learning needs of individuals require a change in the existing paradigm of engineering education. What is needed is a more flexible, learner-centric paradigm that, among other things, instills in individuals the habit of being self-directed lifelong learners. The proposed approach to addressing the changing needs of engineering education is based on mass customization. In this chapter, the development of this approach over the last decade is traced. Other foundational principles in this approach include focusing on competency-based learning rather than one-size-fits-all content delivery, shifting the role of the instructors to orchestrators of learning, shifting the role of students to active learners, shifting the focus from the lower cognitive levels of learning to the upper levels, creating learning communities, embedding flexibility in courses, leveraging diversity, making students aware of the learning process, scaffolding, and enabling students to make decisions where all information may not be available. In this chapter, an overview of the implementation of this approach in graduate-level engineering design courses is presented for courses offered in three different settings, (a) mass customization of content within a single course, (b) mass collaboration of students in distributed settings, and (c) jointly offered cross-institutional courses with distance learning students. The implementation details include technical themes for the different courses, the course architecture (activities and their interdependencies), the assignments, learning modules, team formation, end-of-semester deliverables, and self-assessment.