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  4. Teaching Transversal Skills in the Engineering Curriculum: the Need to Raise the Temperature
 
conference paper

Teaching Transversal Skills in the Engineering Curriculum: the Need to Raise the Temperature

Kovacs, Helena  
•
Delisle Julien
•
Mekhaiel, Mirjam  
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November 20, 2020
SEFI 48th Annual Conference: Engaging Engineering Education. Proceedings
SEFI 48th Annual Conference: Engaging Engineering Education

Engineers and architects today are dealing with great social, technical and environmental complexities, and the demand for having broadly educated holistic engineers will only continue to grow in the future. Being able to manage and lead diverse teams, understand complex, interdisciplinary systems and solve open-ended problems across and beyond different subjects is expected from the next generation of graduates. With the aim to understand how the future graduates are educated to cope with such complexities, we developed a tool to map out the course curricula and examined the extent to which transversal skills are taught at a leading technical university in Europe. Using MATLAB, we have conducted an exploratory analysis, and this concept paper offers the outcomes of analysing course descriptions of bachelor and master programmes throughout the academic year 2018-2019. By presenting the results in a visual form of a heatmap, we have examined at which moment throughout the curriculum and how frequently are transversal skills included in the teaching objectives. The results indicate an overall gap between teaching transversal skills at both BA and MA level, but also a difference in teaching transversal skill in mandatory and optional courses. Furthermore, throughout the curriculum we observed a significant lack of some critical skills, such as those connected to ethical reasoning. This project opened valuable avenue to deepen the discussion regarding teaching and learning of transversal skills, as well as the structural changes that need to be considered in the education of the engineers and architects in future.

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Type
conference paper
Author(s)
Kovacs, Helena  
Delisle Julien
Mekhaiel, Mirjam  
Dehler Zufferey, Jessica  
Tormey, Roland  
Vuilliomenet, P.
Date Issued

2020-11-20

Publisher

University of Twente

Published in
SEFI 48th Annual Conference: Engaging Engineering Education. Proceedings
ISBN of the book

978-2-87352-020-5

Series title/Series vol.

SEFI Annual Conference; 48

Start page

906

End page

917

Subjects

transversal skills

•

mapping project

•

engineering curriculum

•

interdisciplinarity

URL

Online Proceedings

https://www.sefi.be/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Proceedings-2020-web.pdf
Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
AVP-E-LEARN  
AVP-E-CAPE  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
SEFI 48th Annual Conference: Engaging Engineering Education

Enschede, the Netherlands (online)

September 20-24, 2020

Available on Infoscience
March 5, 2021
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/175770
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