Towards Excellence in Engineering Education The profile of Higher Education Teachers on Engineering Programs

True excellence in higher education, namely in engineering, is a difficult concept to define and attain. Engineering programs tend to value the later years as the most important in terms of training and scientific depth, while the first years are relatively neglected. At the same time, there is still a tendency to look at teachers’ achievements in terms of research and knowledge, detached in a certain way from pedagogy. On the contrary, more focus should be put into analysing the profile of teachers and its adequacy to the different approaches needed across the years and course units of a master program. Added to this, are the distinct “perceived realities” between (i) what teachers see as a satisfactorily provided service, (ii) what students need and feel to be the quality of the learning experience, and (iii) what society expects (and will expect, in the future) from engineers. Different views and different alignments, from different stakeholders, require careful assessment and analysis, since the quality of the teaching and learning (as assumed in this study) is strongly related to an individual (or group) perception. In this paper, a methodology is introduced that involves the main stakeholders in defining the quality of teaching and learning, focused on the first year of engineering courses at the University of Aveiro (Portugal). For this, a set of meetings and discussion forums provided the required context for identifying attributes of the mentioned “perceived quality”. As an outcome, a new model is presented, inspired in methodologies usually applied within the field of product design and development. The first layer of results is presented, together with a preliminary analysis and discussion. Future steps towards the goal of defining the best profile of higher education teachers for achieving (a higher level of) excellence in engineering education are also indicated.