Engineering Education in the IT age 1

[nades]

I want to know the opinions of other people about the change of Engineering Education in the IT age. I think that there is a major change has been done in the way we teach and learn engineering in the last ten years. The existence of the Internet made an important role in the modification of the way we teach.
I want your comments on that.

 

[SnTMan]

nades, as I have been out of college for more than 10 yrs, I don't know what they do now days, but, and this opinion has been reinforced by participation in these boards, I just don't see how you can beat fundamentals, at least in a Bach degree.

Regards,

Mike

 

[electricpete]

A related phenomenon: distance learning.

I got my MSEE from Georgia Tech through a distance learning program in 1996-2000.

I never sat foot on campus, but watched the lectures by video and did the same homework, projects, and took the same exams (proctored locally).

There's a lot of coordination involved in that effort, and email helped make it mcuh more manageable.

I can contract that to my BSEE degree taken approx 13 years before 1983-1987.

It seems there was a much bigger emphasis on numerical solutions (computer simulations, finite element etc) in my second degree in the 1990's than I got when studying in the 80's. Maybe that's a trend?

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[sms]

Pete, you did your Masters 100% distance learning? I thought an accredited degree required at least some time on campus?

-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

 

[nades]

What I meant that the use of computers in teaching, in addition to the use of the internet and the email, helped to facilitate the communication between students and professors. The use of Engineering Software has made also a compulsory change in the teaching process. Students are asked to do more analysis, but not more calculations. The use of Computer Software helped students to gain experience in much shorter time when we learned engineering without computers.

 

[SomptingGuy]

The use of Computer Software helped students to gain experience in much shorter time when we learned engineering without computers.

Don't understand. You cannot gain experience in isolation. You can become familiar with contemporary software products (I recall a pretty neat 6502 assembler in my student days) but you can't assume that today's students are learning tomorrow's tools.

 

[nades]

Dear SomptingGuy, I ment that you can solve 10 problems using the same time that we used to solve one problems. Therefore they can gain experience in a shorter time.

 

[SomptingGuy]

Hmm, you can run analyses quicker perhaps, but understanding the results still takes the same amount of time and experience.

 

[nades]

yes SomtingGuy. But I think that solving 100x100 simultaniuos equations cannot be done in few minutes as may the student do now. I do not mean that the student will become better than his tutor; but, 20 years ago, if you compare yourself with the amount of time you need to solve a big problem, with the time you need today to solve the same problem, you will for sure agree that students today have better chances to learn faster.

 

[SomptingGuy]

... they have more ability to try out the formidable matrix algebra that appears in course notes. (Ax=B, where both A and B are huge and scary). But learning faster, no. Doing coursework faster, yes. I hated writing all those elimination routines in FORTRAN (full pivoting etc) and I'm glad today's students can access canned solutions in (free to students) commercial codes.

 

[Ussuri]

A question:

Do students today lose the deeper subject understanding gained by traditional methods due to a reliance on software which can do lots of calculations quickly but hide the working from the user?

A toughy, and in my opinion knowing the fundamentals is more important than being able to do lots of numerical solutions quickly. If you dont know the fundamentals how do you check the output.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

sms-

There are a lot of 100% distance programs these days, both bachelors and masters. The field has expanded substantially in the last 3-4 years.

 

[greenone]

As an Advisory Board member of an engineering school, I do see that IT has made significant changes to education. I think educators are concerned that analysis programs make it more difficult for students to get a feel for what the right answer to a problem shold be. Kind of like the supermarket checker who wants whatever the register says to ask for, regardless of if you are being charged $10 for a candy bar. You still need to crank thru some problems by hand to understand where you are heading.
Research and online collaboration are much easier now than in the dinosaur days when I was a student. The schools are understanding the importance of turning out a grad that has the ability not only to design the bridge, but explain it to a client, a regulator, the public.
With all the basics that a civil engineer needs these days, it is extremely difficult to cram it into 4 years. You need an advanced degree to obtain education in your specialization.
IT has given students more to learn, not less.

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

greenone-

"IT has given students more to learn, not less."

Star for you. It comes down to how IT is worked into the curriculum. I think it would be best for course to steer clear of all analysis packages and other software aids until the fundamental concepts have been taught and understood.

It took me several semesters of college calculus to undo the damage done to my maths skills in high school by me TI-89 calculator! And I am still recovering from the damage that Mathematica did to my understanding of diffential equations.

 

[GregLocock]

Speaking as a Luddite I'd ban computers both from schools and most undergraduate courses.

Unless you can perform a given analysis by hand (or at least a good approximation to it) then you should not be using a computer to do it.



Cheers

Greg Locock

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[JAE]

Do students today lose the deeper subject understanding gained by traditional methods due to a reliance on software which can do lots of calculations quickly but hide the working from the user?

Absolutely they do. I've seen the degradation in engineers I've worked with since 1980 to today. I use computers all the time so I'm not all that enamoured with hand calculations but I have to say that I think the education that engineers get via work experience is definitely stunted by the computer.

When you do anything by hand - sketch, draw, calculate, there is a sort of mental intimacy that occurs with what you are doing and you have to understand everything you calculate.

If you hand a young engineer a spreadsheet or other program that does the calcs in shorter time, they absolutely do not develop a deep understanding of the nuances of the code, calcs or design process.

The computer speed can help you get a quicker feel for the effect various parameters have on an analysis or design - but you don't learn the guts of what you are actually calculating any faster.

 

[Ashereng]

nades,

I don't think the human species has changed much in 10 years. The way people learn 30 years ago is still pretty much the same as people do today. Evolution takes time.

Computers are great. I am all for them. They are a tool. They are not a god. Just because you use computers now in school does not mean that you are getting a better education than someone 30 years ago before most universities had computers.

Or put it another way. Having a computer will not make you into an Einstein or Da Vinci.

Yes, you can crunch problems much faster with a computer than without. Have you thought about the possibility that if you had to do it by hand, you would be more likely to find shortcuts and approximations? Just a thought.

Unlike some of my peers, I am not a Luddite or Amish. I think technology is wonderful. I don't think technology is the holy grail. A tool in the hand of a master is great. A tool in the hand of an apprentice sometimes don't work.

I graduated many years ago. I recently took a course, and yes, the computer was of great help. Actually, the PDF files are of a great help (the weight of my bag is greatly reduced). The instructor was half my age, as were most of the other students. However, as far as I can tell, I still learned the same way I did 30 years ago. And, as far as I can tell, so did all the other people in the class. The learning was the same. The packaging was definitely different.

Different? Yes. Better? Pretty much a wash.

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
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[davidbeach]

Freshmen should have to do everything with slide rules. Sophomores should be allowed to use punch cards to do their programming. Juniors should be allowed to progress to time-share terminals, and then as Seniors they could be allowed to use personal computers.

I was too late for the slide rules, but wish I'd learned how to use one. I graded papers, statics and circuits, and saw way too many examples of work by students who didn't have enough understanding of the problem to actually solve it and know if they had a reasonable result, an analysis that the slide rule would have forced. I also saw too much reliance on "if the calculator shows it, it must be right". The answer in the back of the book isn't always correct and more than once I saw problems where if the student would have merely written the result of the final calculation they wrote on the paper they would have correctly solved the problem, but instead they wrote down the answer from the back of the book.

Punch cards required much greater thought and analysis of the programming problem than is necessary when the program editor points out all the syntax errors as you create them.

 

[sms]

"Or put it another way. Having a computer will not make you into an Einstein or Da Vinci."

Especially since neither Einstein or Da Vinci had a high powered lap top computer in their study.

Hmmm... an interesting thought experiment... if Einstein or Da Vinci had a laptop loaded with some modern engineering tools would they have accomplished something even grander, or would it have sapped all the imagination and creativity out of them.

I suppose it could go either way....

-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

 

[csd72]

I can often calculate by hand quicker than I can set up an analysis. If you only learn how to do your calculations by computers than you are stuck with them, if you have learnt how to do the hand calculations you eventually learn shortcuts to these and can do preliminary designs much quicker.

You cant say in the middle of a meeting that you need 20 minutes to load up your laptop and input the data, if you can do back of envelope calculations to estimate sizes then this makes you much more efficient.

Computers also make things more complicated as you often have to put every load case in and model things exactly. If you do the same thing by hand you can often instinctively pick the worst case for each member as you design it.

I have intentionally focused on the negative, but I agree there are many positives.