Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 158 de 957
Top-down directives may provide opportunities that lead to research activity in areas that
were previously untried. This was the case in Malaysia when the Malaysian Ministry of
Higher Education together with the Engineering Accreditation Council made a decision to
adopt outcome based education (OBE) as the guiding principle in the design of all new
engineering programmes in tertiary education institutions beginning from 2004. To help
characterize the development of EER in Malaysia we will consider the following aspects:
1. EER publication trends before and after OBE;
2. the focus of research interest after OBE;
3. researchers involved;
4. research designs used;
5. available support.
For this particular case study, the information on how EER came into being through
Strategic Pathway 5 was gathered from 33 papers on engineering education in Malaysia
(Appendix 1) thatwere published in the various conference proceedings and journals.
Although, some of the papers from post OBE implementations may not be related to OBE
directly, we believe they do reflect the research culture on EE at this time.
Findings
The distributions of papers (and percentage in brackets) reviewed are shown in Table 2
and corresponding chart. As expected, publications intensified after the complete cycle of
the OBE implementation.
Table 2: Distributions of EE publications according to year
Figure 1: Distribution of EE publications according to year based on Table 2
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011