Integrating Global Systems Development Skills into the Engineering Curriculum

Educating the "global engineer" has been identified as a priority by leading international engineering organisations such as the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK1, and NSF in the USA(2), among others. While the calls for changes in education to prepare the engineer of 2020 for the world in which she will work have been strident, there are still many questions surrounding how should this be achieved in practice? Inspection of degree programs reveal that competencies stated as learning outcomes for the degree are often more or less non--existent in the learning outcomes for the courses comprising the degree. There are many reasons for this gap, e.g. attitudes such as "competencies can't be taught" and "competencies will evolve by themselves (by practice in the subject)" and crowding the degree program with a multitude of compartmentalized rather small pure subject courses, and we will in this paper address the unfamiliarity among both degree designers and individual teachers regarding what global engineering competencies are and how they can be assessed. We will especially focus on the progression aspect. In this paper we describe a curricular innovation which we have been developing over more than a decade, in which Swedish students work in collaboration with students in Finland, China and America in project based learning environments in two upper level subjects. The goals are to help to develop global engineering competencies and experience, and appreciation for the importance of these skills for future working life. The two courses focus on working in an international context, where the complex demands associated with completing a systems design and implementation task on time are combined with factors such as time-zone differences, the challenges of working in a foreign language, and cultural differences in terms of work culture and community.