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Re-imagining Engineering Education

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Archive for September, 2015

Welcome to the UCL Centre for Engineering Education Blog!

By Paula S Broome, on 25 September 2015

We aim to be at the heart of a conversation about how we educate the engineers of the future. We hope that this blog – and your opportunity to comment – will contribute significantly to the discussion.

The Centre has its origins in the summer of 2013 and was, from the beginning, a collaboration between the Instite of Education and UCL’s Faculty of Engineering. Together, we felt, we could bring a useful perspective.

The Centre has emerged amidst much soul searching in the profession. Many predict an enormous shortage in the talent pipeline. Others wonder why this doesn’t seem to be reflected in engineers’ salaries.

THere is also a lot of reflection that despite large amounts of investment in promoting careers in engineering there are only modest increases in numbers joining the profession.

Our aim is to bring some fresh thinking and to ask some difficult questions.

Our first conversation event is a good example. We are asking whether this country really serious about apprenticeship or has it now become just another policy gimmick?

In a second Conversation in November hosted by the INstitution of Mechanical Engineers we are asking two experts to look at potential new and disruptive education offerings on the horizon.

IN the future we also want to explore whether there is too much unhelpful stratification of routes into the profession. We wonder whether an unhelpful gulf has emerged between so called vocational routes into engineering and academic routes. Arguably too much of the discourse about the skills shortage focuses on HE.

It is clear to us that the engineering profession, globally, is changing quickly. We aim to be promoting models for how, educationally, we respond to this.