Co-designing a new engineering curriculum with industry

Global changes in technology and culture have drastically altered the needs of industry and society and thus the graduate engineering workforce required to fulfil those needs. With access to the whole body of human knowledge at the touch of a fingertip, learning is moving away from merely accumulating a body of facts. Instead, future engineering graduates need skills in assimilating and applying knowledge, thinking creatively, working collaboratively and in being agile and embracing change. As the mind-sets, skill-sets and knowledge-sets needed by engineering graduates shift, so too must higher education curricula, shifting to an experience-based curriculum that stimulates students to develop personal qualities and professional skills alongside the specialist knowledge of their field. Authentic, relevant student experiences that give engineering students employable skills cannot be created in isolation in universities thus a new curriculum is needed, to be co-designed with employers, industry experts, professional bodies and education specialists. This paper describes efforts underway to develop a new engineering curriculum with industry-led and project-based learning experiences running throughout the course and will propose a model for the co-design of this curriculum with industry and other key stakeholders