Engineering: issues, challenges and opportunities for development ...

ENGINEERING: ISSUES CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR DEVELOPMENTof British origin. Tertiary education is in fact just one of thetechnologies on which human development depends, and itcan be situation-relevant or not, as the case may be.The first response of the University of MelbourneThe number of foreign students in the Faculty of Engineeringat the University of Melbourne, both undergraduate andpostgraduate, grew rapidly in the decades following the SecondWorld War, thanks to such programmes as British CommonwealthScholarships, the Colombo Plan and so on. Thehomogeneity of the student body started to break down andacademic staff faced new problems in communicating withstudents and in helping them to learn. The difficulties weremost evident in the issues of fluency or facility in the use ofthe English language. That became the focus for informal discussionswithin the Faculty but they soon broadened to questionthe nature of the education that the students should beentitled to receive.By 1980 78 it had been decided to try to provide a graduateeducation for engineering academics from the less developedcountries, with a prominent part of the curriculum coveringdevelopment issues. Successful completion of the programmewould be recognized with the award of a Master’s degree.The thinking behind designing the new course to make it ofvalue to academics was that (a) there must eventually be ahome-town advantage in providing the push for technologicalchange through the relevant professions in situ rather than ina foreign country, and (b) the most effective multiplier effectcould be obtained by educating the educators. This structurebuilt on the long-standing graduate coursework programmesalready offered in civil engineering and in environmental engineeringat the university.To provide a compact description of the curriculum offeredthrough the Melbourne initiative one must start by saying thatit comprises three components. One is a semester of PreliminaryStudies in which students who need it may accommodatethemselves to their new academic and cultural environmentswhile, at the same time, undertaking studies at the relevantlevel in English for Academic Purposes, and enrolling in seniorundergraduate subjects that complemented their prior undergraduatework. Secondly, the next two semesters are devotedprimarily to graduate coursework, which is itself divided intotwo parts. One is the core material covering developmentissues (which for several years included a subject on the practiceof tertiary education). The other comprised elective subjectsin the candidate’s own discipline, or a related one, so thatthat the development of technologies needs to be regionalized in order to be optimalfor the users. Similarly, variations between nations may be insignificant so that therelevant region is multi-national.78 The intellectual leadership in this concept and its development was provided by ProfessorA.J.Francis, a former Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, later a UNESCO consultantin Turkey and then founding Director of the new IDTC.they return home with a background in studies beyond thelevel at which they will teach undergraduate students. Thirdly,the final semester is devoted to an investigational or researchproject assessed by submission of a ‘minor thesis’. This last segmentfosters the values of enquiry, analysis, synthesis and technicalwriting, which are the stock-in-trade of all academics.For the first several years this programme was supported bythe Australian Government aid agency (now called AusAID)through cost-recovery fees and through assistance in studentrecruitment by AusAID staff in Australian diplomatic offices.Candidates came principally from Asia and Africa, althoughthere were experienced Australian engineers who saw anopportunity to develop their own interests in the material inthe programme, and to do it in a disciplined environment withformal recognition through graduation. There were approximately200 graduates in the first decade.Changes inevitably occurred. An early, purely internal changewas to accommodate candidates whose primary need wasprofessional upgrading through advanced coursework ratherthan preparation for an academic career. This took the form ofa Graduate Diploma programme in which enrolment was cutback to two semesters by reducing the investigational projectto the equivalent of one coursework subject (or 1/8 of thetwo-semester enrolment).A substantial change was triggered by a fairly radical review ofgovernment relations with the universities in Australia. On theface of it the national government withdrew from involvementwithin universities at the detailed level, which had been thepractice in such programmes as the ‘Long Australian DevelopmentAssistance Courses’ typified by the DevelopmentTechnologies Programme in Melbourne. Unsurprisingly, thiswas replaced by a remarkably heavy bureaucratic system tomaintain government accountability. At the micro-level of aparticular programme such as IDTC, the consequence of thatchange in the university-government relationship was that thepromotion of the programme broadened and applicants camefrom a greater variety of professions, not necessarily academic.Enrolment numbers grew – of course – but the proportionwith an interest in education as a topic of study inevitablydeclined.The next change was internal to the Faculty of Engineering –where programmes and centres were merged – which chose toplace its whole Environmental Engineering Master’s Programwithin what had now become the International DevelopmentTechnologies Centre (IDTC). The name was later abbreviatedto International Technologies Centre (but retaining the acronymwhich had gained some currency internationally). In somerespects this was beneficial to IDTC in that the number of studentsin its care increased, as did the diversity of courseworkand project work (including a very well-developed project350