Engineering education: towards 2000

Traditionally Engineering Education has aimed at producing graduates with a wide range of practical skills in addition to providing the necessary intellectual base of theory, hypothesis and knowledge. Now this tradition is under a double challenge, firstly from the offering of virtual education on the World Wide Web and secondly from the increasing costs of providing the practical training. There is a revolution in process where students are being provided with an electronic mobility of educational choice internationally, exposure to different pedagogies and a spectrum of cultural understandings and expectations. The new educational market will be internationally competitive,just as Science and Technology are now the focus of escalation in economic and industrial competition This will threaten the viability of many existing institutions and increase the pressure to reduce hands on training to a minimum. The solution would appear to lie in adoption of the new pedagogies and increasing their economic viability by the formation of national and international consortia or networks.