DAETE
Development of Accreditation in Engineering Training and Education

Reference number : 2006-4563-004-001-CPT-USA

starting date: 1/11/2006 * duration: 24 months

Supported by the Program Atlantis - European Commission

The relevance of the project is directly connected with the mobility of engineers between Europe and the US, with the outsourcing of engineering projects on both sides of the Atlantic and with the need to cooperate in the Lifelong Learning processes of engineers. These issues are currently important and crucial for engineering education and training. This also reflects the need for new and innovative quality assurance procedures for Continuing Engineering Education.

The objectives of the project is to present among the partners the experience and practices of the participating institutions in quality control and accreditation for engineering education and vocational training, to analyze an debate the models that can be used taking account the different experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, to produce guidelines advisable for quality assurance and accreditation, to test the recommendations and to adapt the guidelines to the feedback results.

The planned activities consist of presentation of experiences and case studies in the area of accreditation and quality assessment of engineering education and training, joint meetings of partners to discuss the models and strategies that will evaluation for partners from US and EU, test the recommendations among partners and within the organizations active in this area and to reformulate the models and guidelines according to test results. There is a project external evaluation for each one of the two years allowing a formative judgement of the project.

University of Porto will be the EU coordinator. All EU partners will work on the collection of case studies, practices and experiences in quality assessment and accreditation of education and training in the area of Continuing Engineering Education. The partners involved have a long experience in the area with internal and external results and achievements in this subject and also have been working in international projects and educational organizations and associations.

The US partner, University of Wisconsin-Madison, will manage the US effort. Since the European partners have had more experience with the tools that will be tested, the US response will be much more a testing bed with experienced players and respected institutions. Accreditation of the degree programs in the US is well developed and it must fit with that system as well.

The innovative strategies of this project consist in addressing the different approaches of EU and US about the topic allowing the exchange of experiences and results of case studies. This will allow a reciprocal understanding of the benefits of the methods that can be used by the engineering educational and training community in the UE and in US.

There are also some innovative elements in the quality assessment and accreditation like the methods based on peer review and on the use of the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) methods in the engineering educational and training area of active professionals. This will allow in the EU to have the Continuing Engineering Education programs visible in the European and National Qualification Frameworks.

The added value of the transatlantic cooperation can be me measured under two perspectives. The first perspective is related to the sharing the experiences of the partners on EU and US concerning the quality assessment of education and training in Continuing Engineering Education (CEE). In effect the environments that framed the progress of this area have been different in these two regions. In Europe the research and development about quality evaluation of CEE has been based on joint projects supported by the EU funding. In the US the quality assessment has been developed using market analysis and the activities of organizations like ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education).

These two lines of action have created different lines of actions and references that have not been analysed together by the interested stakeholders. The partners of this project have reasonable experience in this area but have not worked closely to extract the benefits of the differences existing in theories and in the implemented practices. The current proposal has the significant motivation of having this exchange and debate about the methods and practices that will lead to an improvement of the specific knowledge and of the implemented practice. These exchanges and debates will be facilitated by the project development that otherwise would be difficult to carry out by the interested parties.

The main goal of this project is to improve the quality of the CEE courses on both sides. There are other impacts that also deserve consideration like the development and acceptance of common methods of quality evaluation that will facilitate the recognition between EU and US companies, individuals and universities of the CEE courses taken indifferently on each region. Another direct consequence is the expansion of the repository of CEE courses based on a distance mode, online or otherwise. A third marginal benefit is the contribution on a global scale of the definition of guidelines that benefit from the experience of two main advanced engineering education environments.

On another hand it is expected that a system is devised that will help the adoption of a systematic service providing counselling and support for education and training courses of other areas. This is expected to enhance the research for this topic of quality evaluation of professional development courses and activities in other areas of knowledge. It is also expected that the dissemination and testing phases will bring other partners to the working group allowing a richer exchange of ideas and of methods.