Engineering Curriculum Redesign: Is My School Ready For This?

As humanity keeps facing grand challenges engineers are expected to be at the forefront and keep providing sustainable solutions to extremely complex problems. In the meantime, we have reached an era where technological advancement moves at a very rapid speed. That poses a big question to academia. “How should we educate engineers to ensure that they are best prepared for a complex world?” For an engineering curriculum to remain effective and relevant frequent redesign is critical. Despite this generally agreed upon understanding, universities sometimes operate under great pressure and move into initiating curricular change without having considered how multifactorial this process can be. At the same time there are little to no tools to help them determine institutional readiness for engineering curriculum redesign. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has placed quality engineering education at the core of its mission since its founding in 1861. Since then, MIT has not only founded a great number of very advanced forward-thinking engineering programs, but has also collaborated with a big number of international governments and schools in order to guide and support their engineering curriculum change. The Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) is a global consortium within MIT working on this exact topic. J-WEL staff are currently working with experts on said matter to develop a tool that universities could use in order to self-assess their initial readiness as well as their progress as they move on with their curriculum redesign process. This practice paper presents the first iteration of said tool.