A Plan for Competency-Based Individualized Curriculum for Engineering Education

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The objective of this project is to plan different strategies that enable a competency-based individualized education in such a diverse engineering school. While education is significantly different than industrial production of goods and services, we believe that there exist several concepts one can borrow, modify and implement to education systems to answer today's increasing demands. At the very least, one such concept is mass customization of goods and services, which translates into a competency-based individualized education system. This concept aims to provide a set of measurable outcomes (namely, skills, knowledge base and competency of graduates) by characterizing and Individualizing each student's learning process and potential. Ultimately, we envision the development of a competency-based learning system that would reflect a unified academia-industry perspective, provide for the immediate needs of the industry and facilitate scholarly development of future engineers and researchers. In this project, we propose to develop a plan to implement a systems approach and the manufacturing strategy of mass customization to the education process. More specifically, we propose to develop a fundamental framework for curriculum design, which allows for individualized education while still optimizing the capacity of the teaching assets we have for each academic year. The findings from the project will be published in various journals on education research. We also intend to work with local industry to extend our findings and insights to the mass customization of their education and training systems.