New Dimensions in Engineering Technology Education - Introducing a Novel International Collaborative Component to the Undergraduate EET Senior Project Experience

摘要

This paper presents the outcomes of a new initiative that extends the current campus-centered EET Capstone Senior Project activity at DeVry North Brunswick, NJ campus to a collaborative international initiative that includes students from DeVry campus in Salvador, Brazil, creating a multi-team collaboration with geographically dispersed teams as part of this capstone Senior Project course. The main focus of the work described in this paper is comprised of three distinct parts. First, we define and characterize the salient characteristics of this experiment in collaborative education at the undergraduate level. Next, we identify challenges of a novel student-project framework that exposes students to a set of unique experiences intended to emulate the evolution of the engineering work environment that is becoming increasingly collaborative, and increasingly international in scope. This unique component of distance collaboration is absent in most Senior Project collaborations at the undergraduate level in Engineering Technology. Finally, we discuss outcomes and potential new directions of Senior Project initiatives at DeVry North Brunswick campus that leverage off this first experiment and serve to further explore new dimensions in Engineering Technology Education.