New Approach of Engineering Education in the Fourth Industry Revolution Era: A Case Study

Abstract

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is often described as the result of an integration and compounding effects of multiple “exponential technologies”, such as artificial intelligence(AI), biotechnologies, and nanomaterials, which also expends the paradigm of industrial revolution into a future when many of the elements of what we might consider industry-fixed and centralized factories, massive labor forces within large corporations-will no longer exist (Bryan, 2018). In the Fourth Industrial Revolution era, it isn’t very easy to get or retain a stable and continuous occupation with the static knowledge provided by the traditional education system because all occupational environments are rapidly changing, especially in the area of science and technologies. In this respect, the higher engineering education in the conventional approach seems to face problems in dealing with this new paradigm. The new era does not only require to adopt new exponential technologies for more effective teaching and learning but also to demand structural innovation in higher engineering education. Therefore, this paper explores the reason why higher engineering education should be changed in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It studies the new approach of higher engineering education as the aspects of the three significant factors, such as the new role of instructor, new method of the learning & teaching, and the meaning of collaboration. As a case study to explain those three essential factors, the Siemens NX & 3D Print Manufacturing Course at Prince Sultan University is introduced as the new approach of higher engineering education, which gets along with the new era