In response to significant interests in globalization, public policy, and engineering outsourcing that emerged during its 2004 and 2005 annual meetings, ECEDHA, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), held workshop in 2005 that focused on "The Impact of Globalization on Electrical and Computer Engineering Curricula of the Future." The workshop took place at the Constitution Avenue location of the National Academy of Engineering in Washington, D.C. on November 14 and 15, 2005.
Considering a growing need to educate engineering students for competitive careers in a global economy, the educators in attendance carefully pondered how to prepare engineering students for a profession that is becoming increasingly influenced by globalization and outsourcing. They also discussed the challenges educators now face when recruiting students into ECE programs, considering recent negative publicity about outsourcing and the perceived undercutting of the value of an engineering degree in the United States due to global competition.
Those in attendance also reviewed another challenge to educators: the retraining of engineering professionals in fields that have suffered from excessive outsourcing. They discussed how addressing this challenge requires a new emphasis on continuing education to provide opportunities for engineers at all career levels to refresh and change the direction of their evolving careers.
The workshop also explored changes needed in engineering education and ECE curricula to properly prepare graduates from United States institutions for careers in an economy where globalization and outsourcing are predominant characteristics.
The workshop was part of a long-range plan for ECEDHA and the NSF in which they will sponsor a series of three workshops in consecutive years from 2005 through 2007. The 2005 workshop focused on the discovery phase, with its goals being to analyze the effects of globalization on the ECE profession, to propose ECE curricula revisions designed to prepare students for further changes in the future, and to deal with issues involving the recruiting and retention of undergraduate students, graduate students, and young faculty in ECE.
The role of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) was also re-examined, with the workshop seeking to define changes needed in the ABET process to facilitate the creation of curricula that prepare students to effectively deal with the globalization of their profession.
The 2006 workshop will explore the implementation phase of this, in particular how ECE educators can bring about much needed curricular change in light of traditional program structures and increasing pressures to introduce emerging technologies into already crowded ECE curricula.
The final workshop in 2007 will focus on assessment and continual improvement of curricular revisions that were identified and implemented in the two previous years.
