Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011 - rees2009

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) Página 894 de 957
years contributed, though this was described as the “relative opportunity to perform
research”. Distinguished teaching awards counted for a single point.
Johnston (2008) has reported American experiences with similar changes, anticipating
significant future rises in student contributions: “it is not clear that society is necessarily
better served by universities all struggling to displace one another on some putative
prestige ladder with little or no sensitivity to the public opportunity costs ... ... this marketdriven
drive for betterment—for higher rankings, greater scholarly prestige, a deeper
applicant pool, and a greater market share of top students and research contracts—is a
major reason for the elite of America’s colleges and universities being the envy of the
academic world. At the same time, this market-driven competition also drives up top
faculty and administrative salaries, the institutionally-borne costs of research, and the
expensive amenities that attract the most sought after students (and their parents), and
thus contributes to the steep upward trajectory of higher educational costs and to the
financial fragility of US colleges and universities.”
The strong focus on research as an institutional objective in itself contrasts with an
alternate view that dominated universities until the mid-1990s. Research was then seen as
a means of retaining the interest and loyalty of leading faculty, a compensation for
relatively low salaries largely determined by government funding for a teaching
institution (Nelson & Hevert, 1992, p. 481).
At the same time as these resourcing changes, the author’s university adopted a
completely new degree structure similar in principle to the European Bologna model
(Mansmann & Scholl, 2007; The University of Western Australia, 2008). There were
several objectives, including a large reduction in undergraduate degrees (69 down to 4),
simplifying course structures to achieve economies of scale, broadening undergraduate
education by requiring all students to study outside their chosen discipline, and new
teaching techniques to improve learning. Professional faculties were most affected by the
change. While law and medicine decided to become graduate schools, the engineering
faculty was constrained by government funding to adopt a hybrid undergraduate and
graduate programme that requires that every component of the programme to be redesigned
(Trevelyan, Baillie, MacNish, & Fernando, 2010). This was a high risk strategy,
sharply reducing direct funding for teaching to retain more flexibility for discretionary
research funding initiatives, while at the same time implementing a radically new course
structure and seeking significant learning improvements. The author’s university is
located at the centre of one of the world’s greatest contemporary industrial expansion
efforts and future energy wealth perhaps justifies this research-led ambition. Current
plans for expansion of petroleum, mining and energy production in the next few years
exceed US$ 150 billion in a state with a population of just over two million people.
A case for investment in engineering education improvement?
Many engineering educators and researchers have expressed frustration when writing or
speaking about education reform (e.g.Heywood, 2005). Why, they ask, is it so difficult to
gain the support of colleagues for education reform when the benefits are so clear?
Whether it is problem-based learning, cooperative learning, an integrated curriculum, it is
Proceedings of Research in Engineering Education Symposium 2011
Madrid, 4 th - 7 th October 2011