Home page > Engineering Education > The National Doctrine of Engineering Education. Basic principles

Download the whole document (DOC, 389K)

THE NATIONAL DOCTRINE OF ENGINEERINNG EDUCATION
BASIC PRINCIPLES

Analysis of factors that determine the development of engineering education shows that the elaboration of the engineering education doctrine must be based on the following (Fig. 4):

• analysis of fundamental reformist improvements in scientific and technical, and socio-economic spheres on the threshold of the 21st century (stable development, mankind survival imperative, anthropoeconomics, technological development, society of education formation, development of practically-oriented complex multidisciplinary sciences, society informatization and mediatization etc.);

• forecast of conceptual and structural manufacture alterations; country's science and culture, as well as people's educational needs;

• investigation of processes of establishment of the country's multiform economics and orientations of regional economics;

• systemic objectives and values concept of engineering of tomorrow;

• taking into account the emerging professional education philosophy;

• state and dynamics study of engineering labor-market and intellectual produce on the regional, interregional, national and international level;

• taking into account the role of professional engineer's personal organization in formation of the engineering type of thinking, his own choice of integration into engineering culture, his aim at self-development and professional creative work.

Fig. 4.

It is asserted that education should reflect and reproduce the troubles of the society it exists in. In the given doctrine, the system of engineering education is to provide formation and establish conditions for evolutional new generation nurture of highly educated professionals in the engineering sphere, who are able to support stable dynamic economics development, and innovation development of various spheres of practical work on the basis of high-end technologies; specialists for whom self-development and professional skill, elaboration of individual activity style are priority guidelines during the whole life. Engineers of the new generation should be professionally and socially protected by the education quality from the real risk of conversion a person into plug-in technologies material.

The "tree" of objectives, functions and structures is elaborated as a basis for determination the requirements for an engineer and the content of engineering education. Formation of such systemic engineering description is provided by the experts using the methods of systems engineering, modern methods of work with experts and expert information processing.

The fragment of the objectives tree, including the global engineering objective and its decomposition by the structure and life cycle of end products manufacture, is represented in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5.

Further decomposition of the objectives tree by the requirements of systems of objectives determination (Fig. 6), engineering structure, as well as experts work designed to define simplicity, plenitude, and essentiality of acquired purposes and value aims, functions and structure of engineering, their ranking and aggregation should allow to form the normative variant of the tree of engineering objectives, functions and structures, that will serve as a basis for designing of engineering training content.

Fig. 6.

Usually purpose structures of that kind contain up to several thousands of elements, therefore generation, holding, actualization, and navigation according to this structure, as well as the analysis and formation of design decision require the use of special dataware and software.

The first stage of such purpose structure of engineering allows the experts to determine the character and the level of engineering education.

According to the preliminary experts' opinion, multistructural economics and diversity of society's professional and educational interests form the market requirement for engineering education of various level and character: engineers-professionals (engineering elite), engineers of encyclopedic learning, oriented towards work for small-scale enterprises, manufacturing engineers and technologies transfer engineers (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7.

As we see it, the given system of requirements, described by means of engineering objectives tree, should be converted into requirements for the level of preparedness of those who have completed their education according to the course program (specialty) ratified in the State educational standard.

Currently the State educational standard includes the following components: overall specialty performance; general requirements for the level of preparedness of those who have completed their education according to the course program including requirements for general grounding (purposes) and requirements for knowledge and skills in accordance with the disciplines cycles (humanitarian and socio-economic, mathematical and natural-scientific, general professional and special (purposeful problems); as well as mandatory minimum of the content of professional educational specialty program (problem-oriented tasks). It is important that only purposes be fixed in the State educational standard, and it should be supplemented with the systems of test rating, associated with the international systems. All the rest standard components are the prerogative of the higher educational institution and are included into the University's educational standard as means of national goals achievement in engineering (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8.

Within the frameworks of produced doctrine it is suggested to vastly reduce the number of specialties in the state classifier, restricting them by the number of allied specialties, which cover all engineering spectrum. It is unreasonable to fulfill the development of the state classifier only at the expense of new multidisciplinary specialties emergence.

<-- to top of page