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Chapter
Undergraduate Engineering Education for the Future
The second decade of the twenty-first century has seen the human race facing many challenging problems on a global level. These include – conflict, the spread of viruses, food security, political and economic ...
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Chapter
Nature of Research
The word research is widely used in the general community to refer to any activity that seeks information or perhaps new knowledge for an individual. For example, some might describe their investigation of what t...
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Chapter
Communicating Research Outcomes
An essential final step in any research project is to make the work available to others. The forum used to publish or publicise the work can take many forms, the choice of which is important. The value of the ...
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Chapter
The Changes Needed
In earlier chapters we reviewed education and research from a very broad point of view, for each considering their purpose, effect, and the role culture and society have played in their development. Collective...
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Chapter
An Overview
We learn from the moment we are born, perhaps even earlier. How do we do this? In part by experimentation—trial and error, action followed by observation of effect and in part learning from what others have le...
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Community and Society
Education is embedded in the concept of community and society. It is part of the glue that brings and keeps people together in groups. Throughout human history communities and societies have evolved through le...
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Chapter
Nature and Science
The world we live in, seek to understand and adapt to our needs, is governed by nature. Nature includes everything in the universe—both the living and the inanimate. Science is a method of investigating nature...
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Chapter
Engineering and Engineers
Since early in human history people have used the concept of engineering without any formal understanding or knowledge of the science behind it. Archaeological studies have found many examples of the use of ba...
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Chapter
Problem Solving and Mathematical Modelling
Together with the growth in knowledge over time, there has been a corresponding increase in the complexity of problems that need to be solved. The advances in computational capacity and methodology over recent...
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Chapter
Skills
This chapter concludes Part A of this book, that part in which we consider knowledge and skills. To this point knowledge—its character, features, context and constraints—has been considered. In this chapter th...
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Chapter
Engineering Research
The fundamental nature of engineering, the link between science and technology, is considered in detail in Chapter 7. From the beginning of human history, engineering ha...
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Chapter
Research Education
Earlier chapters covered the scope and features of the education process (Chapter 11), those features needed in a contemporary setting in relation to primary, secondary ...
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Chapter
Research and Quality
Formal study of the quality of activities in an organisational setting was discussed in Section 21.2. The methodology was first developed for activities in the manufacturing sector of the economy and then exte...
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Chapter
Knowledge
This chapter looks at human knowledge in general. Getting to know something is one of the many processes of the human brain and knowledge is its result. These have been the subjects of human inquiry for millennia...
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Culture
The term civilisation is often used almost synonymously with culture but they are two different aspects of a single entity. Civilisation is the external manifestation (as discussed in the previous chapter) and...
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Academic Disciplines
For research and educational purposes, Universities cluster the study of related knowledge into recognised areas of specialisation—academic disciplines. Engineering is an integrating academic discipline that d...
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Chapter
Nature of Education
The word ‘Education’ has been derived from several different Latin roots which together define the scope of the modern meaning of the word. In a broad sense education is the transfer of knowledge and skills. Educ...
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Chapter
Engineering Education and Its History
The history of technology was discussed in Section 6.5 and that of engineering in Section 7.7. In this chapter the focus is on how these influenced engineering education. The earliest evidence of engineering o...
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Chapter
Education and Quality
Quality is a term widely used in many contexts and no single definition can capture all of its different facets. Formal definitions and methods to measure quality have been developed in both the manufacturing ...
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Chapter
History of Education
There have been many approaches to education throughout human history. They have been largely evolutionary in nature, influenced by local needs, culture, language and community—aspects discussed in previous ch...
