Exploring Online Engineering Education for Sustainable Development: Reconceptualizing Curriculum at Scale
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Projected growth in urban centers will require increased engineering talent and resources to facilitate the infrastructure demands of growing cities (Ibrahim et al., 2016). This study sought to understand how universities in Kenya, Rwanda and Canada were currently equipped to scale and support engineering programs on sustainable development. I travelled to Kenya and Rwanda in July of 2016, and to Canada in August and September of 2018, to study engineering programs and interview faculty members at five universities. Pinar’s (1975) method of currere was used as a theoretical framework for studying online engineering education in post-colonial contexts. The study paired the theoretical framework with a case study methodology. The study generated six themes related to scaling engineering education for sustainable development online. The themes are the engineering curriculum, online learning, accreditation, the progression from an engineering graduate to a professional, the government influences and international influences. The findings provide insights for a researcher and an educator to consider when studying and designing online engineering education for sustainable development at scale. The findings emphasize the importance of incorporating hands-on solutions in the engineering curriculum, the need to negotiate with the stakeholders from the universities, accreditation boards, local and international governments, and the importance of contextualizing the curriculum to the students and their environments. The findings also revealed the significant involvement of China in government-sponsored infrastructure projects in East Africa, the increase in the number of MOOCs on sustainable development, the importance purposefully filling academic and development spaces in a good way, and how the method of currere can be used to bridge a gap between engineering and education university departments. Further research is needed to explore how educators and researchers can develop the necessary skills to collaborate with individuals with different worldviews, understand the impact that China’s involvement in East Africa has on sustainable development and engineering education, interview other stakeholders identified by the participants, and, how future sustainable development projects will affect engineers and their environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".