Emerging technologies in engineering education: can we make it work?

This paper deals with an explorative research into the use of emerging technologies for teaching and learning. An important stimulus for this research is the skills gap. The rapid changing demand puts a lot of pressure on education and the promise is that technology might help to solve the problem. The expectation is that indeed the next generation of technologies will affect education more profoundly, because of the increase and the vast integration of these technologies in our society at large. Engineering education has been reluctant in accepting technologies for learning, but the speed of change needs to be acknowledged and education cannot continue to say that the demand for new skills is a world we do not know yet. The exploration starts with an assessment about what kind of technologies are at stake and what their contribution might be for education. Recent research and reports are used to value the educational technological developments; representatives from industry and education have been interviewed and a small number of experiments are being executed to gather further knowledge and experience. At the time of writing these experiments are ongoing, but we allow to zoom in on Virtual Reality (VR) as one of the most promising technologies. The focus in this research is on the perceived value for education and therefor the exploration is very much related to the triangle perspective of student – teacher – organization as interrelated stakeholders and decisive for the usability of technology. The guiding questions are: what is the perceived value for the students; what is the value for the teacher and what are the consequences for the organization? The one thing that emerges is that engineering education needs to be much more proactive to master the question about technology in teaching and learning. This ongoing exploration is an initiative of the 4TU Centre for Engineering Education which is part of the 4TU Federation being an alliance of the four technical universities in the Netherlands EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION: CAN WE MAKE IT WORK?. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317958875_EMERGING_TECHNOLOGIES_IN_ENGINEERING_EDUCATION_CAN_WE_MAKE_IT_WORK [accessed Oct 2, 2017].OLD E&SS education center FOCU