Improving the agility of engineering education by virtual organization

Abstract

Nowadays we are in an ever-changing world and higher engineering education is facing more challenges than before. Due to the globalization of economy, engineering products are manufactured by integrating resources from many countries all over the world. Engineering projects are implemented by the people with different cultural background. Programs of higher engineering education seem to be more specialized and more comprehensive. Meanwhile, each program is getting more and more cross disciplinary based. The trend of these changes continuous forward and the changes are getting more and more rapidly so that higher institutions find more difficult to cope with these changes than before. It becomes very important to improve the agility of engineering education in order to keep its capability of competition in education market. According to the experiences in manufacturing industries, the agility is simply considered as the ability of quick responsiveness at low costs. In this paper, based on the successful implementation in manufacturing industries, virtual organization is introduced to improve the agility of engineering education. A two-dimension model is developed to illustrate how different programs are built on different disciplines by means of virtual organization. In this model all the disciplines in an institution are considered as a set of real organizations in real dimension and all the programs are considered as a set of virtual organizations in virtual dimension. Furthermore, the concepts of modularization and postponement are employed in curriculum development to facilitate the implementation of virtual organization in higher engineering education and then to combine the advantages of scale and scope for teaching administration.