Engineering Education for All: Strategies and Challenges

摘要

The path to the future requires the best possible trained engineers for further developing and mentoring the technological advances that are reshaping the present. Such advances may be the keys for facing the challenges ahead, including the population outgrowth, the climate changes and a global need for sustainability and responsible management, which probably will not come from traditional politics, but from people capable of building bridges between the mentioned advances and of handling them ethically. All this brings us to the topic of "Engineering Education for All''. If the "engineers of the future'' are to be key players in solving current challenges of Mankind, we will need the most talented and motivated ones, regardless of their social background and economical status. In this study we try to methodically analyze the main strategies for the promotion of "Engineering Education for All'', mainly linked to actuations which directly affect students or teachers (and teaching methodologies) and which take advantage of the environment and available resources. From an initial list of 60 strategies, we focus on the 10 drivers of change considered more important after an initial evaluation. Subsequently, a systematic analysis of the typical problems linked to these main drivers of change, enables us to find and formulate 10 major and unsolved problems. After selecting these typical problems, we put forward 24 different solutions, for short-term actuation, and discuss their effects, while bearing in mind our team's experience, together with the information from the studies carried out by numerous colleagues.