Incorporating global skills within UK higher education of engineers

explore how partnerships with business, NGOs and other
universities offer opportunities to increase funding and share
costs.

Research focus

‘The funding and ranking-driven focus on research in many
universities is constraining the development of innovative
learning and teaching in engineering’ (RAEng, 2007). A
Cambridge professor stated there is little financial and career
incentive to develop more practical and participatory
pedagogies such as role plays. This is true not just for
engineering or for Cambridge but across academia. The
importance of the Research Assessment Exercise has left
teaching feeling like a 'poor relation' in terms of competition
for staff time and commitment in our leading universities
according to the Royal Academy of Engineering. Within the
research framework there is the perception that research
councils prioritise hard specialist, scientific and engineering
research over multi-disciplinary research looking at the wider
sustainability and development context. Whilst teaching staff
are also motivated by professionalism and the desire to make
courses interesting and relevant, one way universities can
redress this imbalance, the academy suggest, is to “recog-
nise the importance of excellent and innovative course
design and delivery through promotion criteria and reward”
for teaching staff. Professional engineering and education
bodies also have an important role in influencing the
research councils and higher education funding.

Senior management support

As with any process of institutional change support for
change from senior management is essential. In order to
make rapid change on the global agenda, senior manage-
ment need to be convinced and supportive of the idea that
global issues and sustainable development are the key
drivers for HEIs in the UK and these issues should be at the
heart of their institutional strategies and thinking. Senior
management support is vital at both the faculty and
university levels. A key strategy to win this support is to
demonstrate the strong business case for a greater global
dimension in teaching and the strong alignment between
the global dimension and many other drivers of change
within higher education and engineering.

Part 2: Incorporating the global dimension within learning

Having explored why the global dimension is so critical to
engineering education and what the global dimension looks
like, this second part of the publication aims now to consider
how the global dimension can be embedded by looking at
a range of strategies and approaches currently being
adopted by UK universities. The Joint Board of Moderators
advises that the best way to embed sustainable development
(which as previously noted is closely allied with the global
dimension) is by a teaching and learning process that:

■ Provides an interdisciplinary perspective on the problems
that engineers will tackle in practice

■ Develops an understanding of the interaction between
engineering, the environment and society

■ Develops an ability to use technical engineering knowl-
edge to help solve complex problems as described above

Designing courses which incorporate these features whilst
maintaining the integrity of core engineering is a complex
trade off and the solutions which best suit each faculty and
university will be different. The approaches outlined in stage
3 are in current practice and many of the examples and
comments were gathered during the seminars and
interviews. One of the principle findings to arise from the
research and dialogue with academics for this publication
was the value staff place on mechanisms to share lessons
and experience with other universities and within their own
universities. This is one area where national stakeholders
such as government, the professional institutions and the
Higher Education Academy have a vital role to play. As a
contribution to this, Engineers Against Poverty have
compiled a directory of engineering education initiatives and
contacts.⁵¹ Although far from exhaustive, it illustrates the
range and creativity of what exists. The framework of
approaches breaks down into curriculum, partnerships and
extra-curricula learning approaches which can be adopted at
the course or faculty level as well as university-wide, national
and international approaches to embedding the global
dimension.

The Global Engineer Page 15

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