Towards a high quality university engineering research and learning environment

Recently more evidence has mounted showing that engineering students may be lacking a thorough foundation in their acquired university knowledge at the 3 year level and at risk of not having a sufficient engineering ‘toolkit’ upon graduating. Possibly more worrying is the often observed problem of students not knowing how to begin when confronted with something new. Amongst Higher Education Educators of Mechanical Engineering at a Global level there is a growing impression that students are becoming out-of-touch with physical understanding. There is also recognition that engineering education must continue throughout his/her career. This is because it is impossible to cover all facets of engineering in enough detail, let alone to be technologically current. Often the concept of life long learning is drummed into students but it should be a positive side effect of enjoyable learning. As noted by others, Globalisation is leading to greater evaluation of university programs between institutions, frequent and diffusive mobility of staff and students and merging of industry expectations. In turn benchmarking with different methods is becoming a necessity for high quality education and research. Hence in the globalised teaching, research and working environment producing underprepared graduates is uncompetitive and therefore unacceptable. It has been said that knowledge-based competition is so intense today that companies often outrun universities in technological and scientific advance because they employ more high calibre professionals and they often have greater resources at their disposal. This paper looks at some of the factors that may influence student education such as deductive or inductive approaches, and academic research such as funding and bureaucracy. It also draws on author experience at an Italian and an Australian university and the work of other practitioners to analyse and suggest some possible ways forward.