REEdI Design Thinking for Developing Engineering Curricula

Abstract

Universities are coming under increasing pressure to re-invent the way that engineering is taught in order to produce graduates that are capable of meeting the skills needs of the country’s industries. This paper described an active project where Design Thinking (DT) methodology is being applied in a novel way to Engineering Curriculum Development. Enterprise partners from a range of different manufacturing sectors participated in a series of Curriculum Development workshops and the results were cross referenced with subjects taught on existing engineering programmes internationally. This process highlighted the need for increased training in Lean, 6-Sigma, transversal and soft skills competencies, and the need to review how and when content is delivered. A survey was developed from the results of the workshops and sent out to a larger cohort of industry contacts for feedback on the proposed Engineering curriculum. Design Thinking methodology has helped ensure our customers’ needs are met by building the curriculum framework around competencies identified by both industry and academia while ensuring the students engage in a significant learning experience through experiential and applied learning using the latest immersive technologies.

Design thinking capabilities in the digital world: A bibliometric analysis of emerging trends

“…• The capability to integrate different disciplines in curricula (Kuo et al, 2019;Satpathy et al, 2020;Lynch et al, 2021) • The capability to integrate industry and academic perspectives (Boyle et al, 2022) • Interdisciplinary collaboration; Involving users; Engaging in integrative and holistic thinking; Learning by doing; Failing often and soon…”

Innovating Engineering Education at Greenfield Sites: Transferable Insights from Doblin’s Model of Innovation

“…The Rethinking Engineering Education in Ireland (REEdI) project at Munster Technological University (MTU) was successful in securing funding of €9 million from the Irish Higher Education Authority under the Human Capital Initiative Pillar 3 programme to deliver agility and innovation in Engineering Education [6]. The initiative is a quadruple helix collaboration between academia, industry, government and research centres.…”

“…In the last 6 years, FEIT has been transforming its engineering programs by introducing a sequence of studios to build professional competencies. [6] channel through which the product or service is delivered, expanding the brand, and improving customer engagement.…”

“…These programs also have strong input from industry into their overall program standards, often sourced through formats such as workshops and surveys [6,9]. While having program standards is not a major innovation per se, engaging closely with industry is a form of the Product Performance innovation of Safety.…”

“…In terms of driving the porous nature of greenfield sites, many funding bodies are acutely aware of the requirement to innovate in the network dimension and how important this back-end configuration setup is for later innovation possibilities. For this reason, we see funding agencies mandating strong networks as a key criterion for awarding funding to support some of the greenfield projects identified in this paper (REEdI [6], IRE [12]).…”