REFORMING UNDERGRADUATE STRUCTURAL ENGINEERING EDUCATION: A LEAP OF FAITH

Author(s):  
Ezzeldin Sayed-Ahmed

Do we need to reform civil engineering education? The notable remark about any listing of top universities is that more than 60% of these universities are located in the G8 countries with GDP of more than 60% of the world total. This fact confirms that economic growth is strictly tied to social and cultural development, which is linked to the intellectual and scientific development presented by higher education. This also reveals that the answer to the concern of reforming engineering education is YES. Thus, teaching paradigms must change to fit needs and modes of today’s students; they are not interested in passive learning. Active learning must be the path for today’s generation of ubiquitous-learning. Different innovative teaching techniques for high-level structural engineering courses have been adopted by the author and proved to be rewarding. Among these paradigms are blended learning and flipped classes, which stretch the utilization of technology in classes. Other new techniques such as student-generated examinations, student-generated classes, design competitions and project-based learning are reflection of student-centered education. Here, the said innovative paradigms, which were recently applied by the authors will be presented.

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yustinus Calvin Gai Mali

Project based learning (PBL) refers to an approach to instruction that teaches curriculum concepts through a project espousing principles of learner-centered teaching, learner autonomy, collaborative learning, and learning through tasks. This paper justifies the implementation of PBL to design two main projects and their activities in Creative Writing and Second Language Acquisition classes at English Language Education Program of Dunia University Indonesia (ED-DU). Moreover, the paper details pedagogical practices and learning resources deployed in both classes. The discussions would seem to indicate that the use of PBL grounded in the projects shows a high level of students’ participation in learning, and teachers’ innovative teaching practices. Finally, the paper hopes to provide EFL teachers who have similar teaching practices with practical ideas they can modify and develop to help students achieve particular learning objectives in their classrooms and continue the positive trends of implementing PBL in teaching and learning.


Author(s):  
Michael Max Bühler ◽  
Konrad Nübel ◽  
Thorsten Jelinek

We are calling for a paradigm shift in engineering education. In times of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (“4IR”), a myriad of potential changes is affecting all industrial sectors leading to increased ambiguity that makes it impossible to predict what lies ahead of us. Thus, incremental culture change in education is not an option any more. The vast majority of engineering education and training systems, having remained mostly static and underinvested in for decades, are largely inadequate for the new 4IR labor markets. Some positive developments in changing the direction of the engineering education sector can be observed. Novel approaches of engineering education already deliver distinctive, student centered curricular experiences within an integrated and unified educational approach. We must educate engineering students for a future whose main characteristics are volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. Talent and skills gaps across all industries are poised to grow in the years to come. The authors promote an engineering curriculum that combine timeless didactic tradition, such as Socratic inquiry, project-based learning and first-principles thinking with novel elements (e.g. student centered active and e-learning by focusing on the case study and apprenticeship pedagogical methods) as well as a refocused engineering skillset and knowledge. These capabilities reinforce engineering students’ perceptions of the world and the subsequent decisions they make. This 4IR engineering curriculum will prepare engineering students to become curious engineers and excellent communicators better navigating increasingly complex multistakeholder ecosystems.


Author(s):  
V. Kovpak ◽  
N. Trotsenko

<div><p><em>The article analyzes the peculiarities of the format of native advertising in the media space, its pragmatic potential (in particular, on the example of native content in the social network Facebook by the brand of the journalism department of ZNU), highlights the types and trends of native advertising. The following research methods were used to achieve the purpose of intelligence: descriptive (content content, including various examples), comparative (content presentation options) and typological (types, trends of native advertising, in particular, cross-media as an opportunity to submit content in different formats (video, audio, photos, text, infographics, etc.)), content analysis method using Internet services (using Popsters service). And the native code for analytics was the page of the journalism department of Zaporizhzhya National University on the social network Facebook. After all, the brand of the journalism department of Zaporozhye National University in 2019 celebrates its 15th anniversary. The brand vector is its value component and professional training with balanced distribution of theoretical and practical blocks (seven practices), student-centered (democratic interaction and high-level teacher-student dialogue) and integration into Ukrainian and world educational process (participation in grant programs).</em></p></div><p><em>And advertising on social networks is also a kind of native content, which does not appear in special blocks, and is organically inscribed on one page or another and unobtrusively offers, just remembering the product as if «to the word». Popsters service functionality, which evaluates an account (or linked accounts of one person) for 35 parameters, but the main three areas: reach or influence, or how many users evaluate, comment on the recording; true reach – the number of people affected; network score – an assessment of the audience’s response to the impact, or how far the network information diverges (how many share information on this page).</em></p><p><strong><em>Key words:</em></strong><em> nativeness, native advertising, branded content, special project, communication strategy.</em></p>


Author(s):  
Yeon Kim ◽  
Suk Lee ◽  
Changsun Ahn

Project-based learning is one of the popular and promising approaches in engineering education. The current study reports on a curriculum that was designed and implemented by a graduate school to help students gain knowledge and creative thinking skills through collaboration between different majors during industrial projects in a graduate course on home appliance engineering. The students selected the topics, planned the project, conducted research, produced a prototype, and presented their results under the guidance of a group of advisors consisting of professors, technical advisors, and industry mentors. A quantitative analysis showed that this approach was effective in improving the students’ attitude toward engineering. Furthermore, a qualitative analysis showed that this learning method helped students learn how to communicate and present effectively, to flexibly approach projects, and to understand the practices of industrial research. Based on the findings, the current study discusses how the project-based learning helped students advance.


Author(s):  
Anabela C. Alves ◽  
Francisco Moreira ◽  
Celina P. Leão ◽  
Sandra Fernandes

Abstract Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an active student-centered learning methodology. Several schools (of varying degrees of education) have implemented, in different ways, PBL, having as common strands that the student learns in teams, and being challenged in the context of a case-scenario. In Portugal, a PBL methodology has been implemented, in the first year of an Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) program, for more than 15 years. This represents a total number above 700 students of IEM enrolled in PBL during the reported timeframe. A continuous improvement process of the PBL activities was relentlessly pursued during such period. Grounded on end-of-term on-line PBL process satisfaction questionnaires, as well as on results of each PBL edition final workshops, this paper studies and reports on a number of such achievements and shortcomings. Thus, this paper presents the analysis of the results of ten academic years of PBL evaluation process, grounded on the compiled results obtained from 2009/10 to 2019/20. Also, a synthesis of the effective findings (either positive or negative), systematically pointed out by the students, will be presented. Altogether, the PBL implementation in the IEM program has been very positive for students and teachers and worth for others to follow.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Valentina I. Borisova ◽  
Igor V. Borisov ◽  
Farkhad S. Karagussov

Abstract Financial institutions are the centre of economic and legal interests of participants of the financial services market, which is itself characterised by a high level of conflict of interests of its participants. The purpose of the article is the scientific development of the legal structure of organisational and legal forms of financial institutions, in the market of financial services, as a legal mechanism for reconciling the economic and legal interests of the main participants of this market. The features of basic and modified legal forms of legal entities are elaborated in this article. It is determined that financial institutions are established and operate in ‘modified’ legal forms. Such forms emerge due to the supplementation of the structure of the main elements of the basic legal forms of legal entities. This refers to additional functional legal means that reflect special requirements for the relevant types of legal entities, depending on the economic and legal interests of their founders/participants.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yılmaz Köylü

Abstract This article details how introductory linguistics courses can increase student engagement and learning through a project-based approach, whereby the students first study the subfields of linguistics with a view to complete the main project of the course, namely to construct a novel language. I provide information from a semester-long course with specific project-based activities teachers could utilize in their classes. I also thoroughly examine the constructed language projects based on 33 student submissions in an introductory linguistics course in the US. The analysis indicates a high level of engagement and creativity by the students in creating a distinct orthography, phonetic, morphological, and syntactic rules and semantic properties for their constructed languages. The results from a 20-item questionnaire and student exit interviews indicate that the project-based approach adopted in the completion of their constructed languages proved effective in (a) improving student motivation and engagement; (b) helping students apply the knowledge of the material to carry out linguistic analysis; (c) enhancing students’ language learning skills; (d) encouraging them to study additional foreign languages; and finally (e) promoting linguistic diversity. Hence, as an innovative and effective method still in its infancy, project-based learning should be more widely implemented in linguistics instruction.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (S2) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Faustino Andrade

<span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;,&quot;serif&quot;; mso-fareast-font-family: SimSun; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;" lang="EN-US">In the present work, the author reports examples of his involvement in different teaching/learning methodologies during his five years of the Integrated Master Degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto. The aim is to explain how useful those experiences have been, allowing him to explore many techno-scientific activities within his engineering education while student as well as other <span style="letter-spacing: -.05pt;">transferable</span> skills and later, up to the present, as a professional in academic environment. The author wishes to underline the excellent opportunity he had to practice reflection processes as an essential methodology of his engineering education.</span>


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