A Results-Driven Curriculum for Engineering Education

Ngaka Mosia, Kemlall Ramdass, Masengo Ilunga, Lusiwe Maduna

The field of engineering education faces an ongoing challenge of effectively preparing students for the demands of the rapidly evolving technological landscape. Traditional engineering curricula often focus more on theoretical knowledge rather than practical application and outcomes. As a result, engineering graduates are not equipped with the necessary skills to excel in industry, leading to a gap between industry requirements and graduate competencies. To bridge this gap, a results-driven curriculum for engineering education has been proposed to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to succeed in industry. To address the question, “Where do most curriculum programs fall short?” It is noted that curriculum programs focus on delivering content rather than delivering experiences that support and enable change in teaching and learning. When curriculum design is driven by content, it ends up with numerous blurred boundaries regarding the scope, audience, and the applicability of what is contained in the curriculum. Consequently, the curriculum may result in education that falls short in producing graduates required by current and future markets and industry. In an e-learning and distance education environment, a curriculum might look well designed and meet all the set criteria, but it might ultimately match the wrong objectives. The result of this mismatch is that students after completing the curriculum depart with a lot of information in their heads but with no practical skills that they can implement in the workplace. This indicates that the graduate attributes required by Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) and industry were not attained by the student at completion of the enrolled curriculum. The research adopts a qualitative case study approach to explore and explain the steps, activities, and tools that can be used to design a results driven and engineering-focused curriculum solution, that has a clear goal tied to well-articulated pedagogy strategy.

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