Using an international survey to inform scenarios of the future of engineering education

Background: Technological, economic, and social changes will reshape undergraduate engineering education, but there is little consensus on its future. IEEE created a Curricula and Pedagogy Committee (CPC) and charged it with forecasting the future of engineering education in general and specifically to make recommendations regarding roles that IEEE will play in preparing for and crafting that future. The IEEE CPC used scenario planning to consider possible trends in engineering education and is opening its thoughts to public scrutiny. The IEEE CPC developed a survey to compare scenarios that it developed with patterns formed from respondents' views of the future. Purpose: The CPC Committee functions as a research team seeking to learn (1) what is the current state of practice in higher education programs in fields of interest for IEEE?, (2) how are engineering programs forecasting practices that need to be in place to meet the needs of the profession in 10 years?, and (3) what services and collaborations might transform current practice to meet those needs? Design/Method: A survey was developed by the IEEE CPC. To examine how engineering programs might innovate and adapt, the survey included questions about current and future instructional practices and uses of instructional technologies. To examine values and competencies of engineering academics, the survey included questions that addressed skills that students have now and those they should have in the future as well as the roles that evaluation of teaching played in evaluating faculty members. The survey was deployed in July - August 2014 to individuals who (1) teach undergraduate students, (2) administer a degree program (i.e., Department Chairs and Heads), (3) serve as a top-level administrator over all engineering degree programs (i.e., Deans), and (4) work professionally in engineering. The results were compiled by IEEE Strategic Research and reported to the CPC for analysis. Results: This paper describes the demographics of the 2176 survey respondents. In addition, it reports on responses to the survey about teaching and quality versus quantity of engineers. An encouraging finding is that there is agreement among all types of respondents on the strategic priority of quality over quantity of engineers. Conclusions: The congruence of our findings with expectations voiced by others, particularly in the area of teaching methods, indicates that the survey has validity and suggests that fields of interest to IEEE match the aggregate behaviour of engineering described in other work. The general congruence of responses across diverse respondents regarding the strategic priority of quality over quantity suggests that the field may be moving towards the more promising future scenarios. Results from the survey provide insight into the extent to which academics and industry professionals are expecting and contributing to the possible futures described in the scenario planning, which in turn provides insight as to how to prepare for whatever the future holds.