Content Enrichment Exploiting The Cycle From Academia To Industry To Academia

The quest for balance between theory and practice in education is always a challenge and it is usually resolved according to the personal experience of the course presenter. The purpose of this paper is to report on a way to widen that experience through a series of interactions between a newly emerging academic program on electronic systems and training courses delivered by a consortium of high-tech companies. The concepts covered in both programs are very similar. However, the experience of the participants and the desired outcomes in terms of applicable skills are very different. By sharing content and using the rapid reconfiguration procedures inherent in web-supported delivery, we have been able to exploit the synergy between the academic and industry activities. The experience has clarified educational priorities and improved the learning effectiveness for all participants – including the faculty. Origins – parallel programs Many academic courses are reformatted and offered as industry short courses. Less often, courses developed within companies migrate to the academic world. This paper describes experiences where course materials have made several transitions between industry and academia collecting significant enhancements for the recipients on each occasion. The academic applications are in an electronics systems degree program that is being set up at a new campus of one of the university partners. The industry courses have been developed under the auspices of a State-wide consortium of aerospace and electronics companies in alliance with three state universities. Life-long learning easily becomes a cliché, but for the consortium members it is a way of life for a workforce that has to adapt to rapidly changing technology to succeed in global markets. The implications have been a feature of every recent ASEE Conference as well as CIEC workshops 1 . The main features to address the industry requirements are: 1. Design courses to meet industry needs and schedule for convenient times, locations, and course length. 2. Reduce overall engineering and manufacturing education training costs through pooled resources and best practice experience. 3. Enhance and extend the ongoing relationships with the State’s universities. 4. Build a network between high tech industries and state officials to have alignment on policies for education and economic development. 5. Develop a database of contextual industry cases that can be used by the universities to extend the engineering skill set of graduates. P ge 11357.2 6. Demonstrate the benefits of a continuous learning environment with current courses and quantify their impact on all stakeholders. The procedure used by the consortium in this case to develop and deliver industry short courses has been to share internal (non-proprietary) courses with other consortium members. For some topics, academic courses have also been adapted to suit the 1 – 2 day short course format. Over 12 years, a successful portfolio has been established and it continues to evolve successfully. Most courses are now grouped into one of 5 clusters that define a certificate after about 100 hours of class time. The content and format of courses within each certificate is overseen by a Learning & Competency Team (LCT) composed of industry and academic experts. They meet every 6 – 8 weeks to review progress and the changes that need to be implemented. It is no coincidence that when ABET required a similar process to be stated for accreditation, the structure used to manage change in academic programs was very similar. With some simplification, the two development processes have been combined in figure 1. Figure 1. Correspondence of management process for academic and industry courses. Academic course requirements The courses for the Electronics Systems degree program might well have evolved along conventional academic lines where there is a never-ending challenge to squeeze ever-more content into a severely constrained curriculum. The usual Existing courses Requirements Strategic review of skills Review team (Industry + faculty)