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

ENGINEERING CAPACITY: EDUCATION, TRAINING AND MOBILITYExample IDTC initiative – working with ThailandSubsequent ResponsesTwenty years after the start of IDTC a combination ofexternal and internal pressures created a receptive environmentwithin the University for a re-examination of itsimage and modus operandi. The first of these sources ofpressure has already been alluded to – a change in AustralianFederal Government policy on funding mechanismsfor tertiary education, forcing the institutions tospend more energy and resources on expanding non-governmentfunding income. The following statement in theUniversity of Melbourne Strategic Plan in 1997 states:‘With fewer than 2,000 overseas fee-paying students, theUniversity is significantly under-enrolled in such programscompared with other major universities in Australia. Irrespectiveof financial considerations, such a low level ofinternational enrolments is not consistent with the University’sinternationalization agenda. A substantial increase inoverseas fee-based programs also offers the best immediatestrategy for managing the emerging funding gap,which the University faces over the next five years.’Such a statement makes it impossible to deny the evidentfinancial imperative behind a changing attitude towardsforeign students, but elsewhere in the same documentthe academic imperative was articulated, clearly identifyingits competitive element:‘The world’s leading universities of the twenty-firstcentury will be first and foremost international institutions.Such universities will recruit and retain academicand general staff of the highest quality from aroundthe world, attract national and international studentsof exceptional ability, promote high levels of staff andstudent interaction with other leading universities, irrespectiveof location, and maintain curricula that are validand relevant internationally. … The international positioning,recognition and engagement that such universitiessecure will be the ultimate test of their internationalquality and competitiveness.’This represents a clear shift in motivation from the purelyacademic concerns that drove the Faculty of Engineeringto invent a graduate programme to better fit foreign studentsfor foreign engineering practice, but the underlyingdirection of change in academic work was the same –to review and revise what was offered to students, bothdomestic and foreign.An initiative that should be mentioned here is the creationof ‘Universitas 21’ – a cooperating group of universitiesfrom the UK, US, Canada, China, Japan, Hong Kong,Singapore, New Zealand and Australia, with key involvementof the University of Melbourne, and described as:‘a small, well-organized, rationally-structured and highlyeffective network of comprehensive, research intensiveuniversities, capable of achieving the kind of practicaloutcomes that none of the individual members wouldbe able to achieve independently or through traditionalbilateral alliances. Offering its members operational linksaround the world, the network functions as a looselycoupledsystem through which international competitorsmay derive substantial benefits from organised targetedcollaboration.’This Network, if it proves to be durable, is expected toprovide for seamless student and staff mobility betweenthe institutions, and greater cooperation and qualitycontrol in all aspects of university work.Another source of pressure for change is the remarkabledegree of internationalization of the major cities ofAustralia. The associated multi-culturalism is nowheremore evident than in the staff and student bodies in theUniversity of Melbourne. Multi-lingual students comefrom both domestic families, reflecting the impact ofmigration, and from foreign students. Many classes arenow more than 50 per cent multilingual, and the figureof 2,000 overseas fee-paying students mentioned inthe earlier quotation is now an historic curiosity. Thusthe concern in 1977 for the quality of the education ofa minority of international engineering students whosefuture lay outside the culture, which coloured the undergraduatecurriculum, and the extra-mural life of each student,has now expanded into a much broader concernfor true internationalization of all aspects of the University’sfunctions. The Faculties, which were prompt in joiningArchitecture, Agriculture/Forestry, and Engineeringin taking specific steps to direct some of their energiestowards foreign cooperation, include Economics, Medicineand Law.Initiatives springing from the work of IDTCAn interesting example of the valuable outcomes ofthe commitment to internationalization that IDTC representsis an informal meeting between the Director ofIDTC and Professor Krissanapong Kirtikara in King Mongkut’sInstitute of Technology in Thailand. At that meeting,the idea conceived was the collaboration to extendthe well established networking with engineering academicsat the King Mongkut Institute of Technology inThailand (through the medium of the UNESCO RegionalNetwork on Appropriate Technology) by arranging anexchange of students.The Thai university preferred to offer the exchange tograduate students enrolled for Master degrees, manyof whom were potential academics. The Melbournestudents were to come from the senior undergraduateclasses in the various engineering departments. Each universityundertook to provide supervision of the studentsfrom the sister Faculty and to assist with accommodation.Each exchange was for four weeks in each direction;each student made an oral presentation on theirindividual project to the staff and students of the hostuniversity before flying home.Good relations within the Thai university communitymeant that other Thai academic friends of IDTC sharedthe load in Thailand, and IDTC took advantage of theopportunity to involve some engineers from Australianindustry in the supervision of Thai visitors. The languageissue was acknowledged, but the only practicable solutionwas to use existing Thai graduate students in Melbourneto provide pre-departure preparation in Thaiculture and basic Thai language to the selected Australianstudents. The Thai students always had sufficient Englishfluency to cope adequately. The exchanges took placeduring the respective semester breaks in the middle ofthe calendar year. After the first trial year there wereabout twelve students from each institution each year.The effort was made to achieve a gender balance, withas many academic departments represented as was reasonablypossible, consistent with the quality of the studentbeing the principal basis for selection. Some of theAustralian students used the project work in Thailandas a component of their final honours research projectin Melbourne. Well over 200 students were given thisopportunity and the contribution to their educationalexperience should not be underestimated.* As time wenton more Thai universities became involved, includingChulalongkorn, Naureswan and Chiang Mai.Another notable feature of the programme was theopportunity for a number of Melbourne students towork at the King’s Project sites in northern Thailand.These were food processing factories set up so that farmers,who had been weaned off opium production, hada secure market for their fruit and vegetable produce.This was a unique experience for these students whofound themselves in a remote rural location, but yet hadto achieve a project outcome to satisfy the demands oftheir final year project at Melbourne.* Ref: Kirtikara,K. and Mansell,D.S. (1995) ‘InternationalCooperation in Engineering Student Work on Exchange’, vol. 2,Fourth International Symposium on the Role of Universities inDeveloping Areas, incorporating the 1995 UNESCO RegionalSeminar on Technology for Development, Melbourne, 11-14 July.351