Opinion

The World’s largest gathering of engineering education educators and professionals “2010 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition” was held in Louisville, KY during June 20-23. Educators from all over the globe were present but engineering educators from Pakistan were nowhere to be found at this major engineering education gathering.

The conference offered more than 400 technical sessions, panel discussions, poster sessions, and workshops covering a wide spectrum of topics like accreditation, assessment, curriculum, distance education, diversity, education methods, industrial partnerships, faculty professional development, retention and web technology.

More than 2900 authors contributed papers that were published in the conference proceedings. Again, there were no papers contributed by engineering educators from Pakistan.

The conference’s main planetary session featured prominent educator Karen L, Watson, Interim Provost and Executive Vice President, Texan A& M University. In her presentation titled “Can We Accelerate the Rate of Change in Engineering Education,” Dr. Watson spoke about the mechanism that can promote change and reforms. She said that the desire to change engineering education has been championed due to many factors such as global competition, scope and complexity of modern engineering problems, and knowledge of the learning process.

Many programs have been initiated to pilot, evaluate, and promote many pedagogical reforms, and many of these reforms have been integrated into the common practices across numerous programs in schools all over the country. But, individuals associated with engineering education remain frustrated and confused in view of the resistance to some reforms and the slow pace of other reforms.

Dr. Watson said that this frustration and confusion points to the need to study the process of change in large and complex organizations, and to apply lessons learned from educational reform and from organization cultural change to the process of change in engineering education. Dr. Watson hoped that by reframing our mental models of change we may be able to accelerate the depth, breadth, and pace of the changes desired. If such is the assessment of resistance to change in the American universities by Dr. Watson, one can well imagine the state of affairs vis a vis the degree of change and reforms at Pakistani universities.

Engineering education professionals from Pakistan ought to tap into resources offered by the government, private sector, and UNESCO for travel grants and should also collaborate with educators in the United States to co-author papers and make joint presentations at the international conferences. Hopefully, the engineering educators and their students from Pakistan will consider participating in the next ASEE conference which will be held in Vancouver, BC, Canada during June 26-29, 2011.