Engineering Reimagined: (Re)designing Next-Generation Engineering Curricula for Industry 5.0

At our institution, like many others worldwide, it has been over a decade since we have imagined and designed our engineering curricula. Since then, we have ensured and confirmed compliance with accreditation agencies, perfected the delivery of courses, and assessed learning outcomes to ensure that our graduates can be successful in all the different stages of their careers. The problem is that in the last ten years the careers that await our graduates have changed fundamentally such that our curricula of today effectively do not prepare our students for the careers of tomorrow. More importantly, the way students learn has also fundamentally changed, swiftly rendering our instructional methodologies obsolete. Our motivation is the redesign our engineering curricula such that they can transcend the competency gap between the graduates of today and the careers of tomorrow. In this paper, we focus on the redesign of our Computer Engineering (CE) curriculum and describe the reimagining process, which phase one started with the program faculty examining our latest curriculum via a set of guided questions to identify if and how it meets the future needs of industry and the learning approaches of our students, present and future. The faculty identified that the program was lacking in some areas and could be reimagined such that it can: provide skills that can be adjusted and adapted to new areas, allow for more flexibility and humanity in the treatment of students and faculty, focus on future fields (e.g., artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things) while meeting core learning outcomes, strongly push students towards independent learning, and provide the big picture of the learning outcomes and trajectory early and often. In phase two of the process, the faculty reached out to: industry partners to obtain insight into the desired skills of the CE graduates of tomorrow, our learning and teaching support staff to reveal modern teaching practices and tools that could be leveraged by our next generation curricula, and other CE programs to identify how they are adapting to the same challenges. The findings from the research, detailed in the remainder of this paper, were used to fuel the third phase of the Engineering Reimagined project, where the program faculty holistically considered all the feedback, including that of other university-wide committees, focused on inclusive excellence and student retention, to define the learning outcomes of the entire program and map them in knowledge areas, which are then encapsulated in classes (new and existing) that are finally scaffolded in our next-generation CE curriculum.