[机械模具数控自动化专业毕业设计外文文献及翻译]【期刊】加强工业工程有关于特点定义和新兴课题要求的课程-外文文献

Enhancing the undergraduateindustrial engineering curriculumDefining desired characteristics andemerging topicsHamidreza Eskandari and Serge Sala-DiakandaDepartment of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems,University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USASandra FurtererDepartment of Technology Systems, East Carolina University, Greenville,North Carolina, USA, andLuis Rabelo, Lesia Crumpton-Young and Kent WilliamsDepartment of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems,University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USAAbstractPurpose This paper aims to present the results of an initial research study conducted to identifythe desired professional characteristics of an industrial engineer with an undergraduate degree and theemerging topic areas that should be incorporated into the curriculum to prepare industrial engineering(IE) graduates for the future workforce.Design/methodology/approach A survey was administered to faculty and industryprofessionals across the USA to describe the desired characteristics and define the importantemerging topic areas. The modified three-round Delphi technique was applied to obtain consensus andranking of the emerging topics.Findings The research findings that identify the desired characteristics and the most importantemerging topics to be incorporated into the reengineered curriculum discussed in this paper. Statisticalanalysis of the results indicates some differences in opinions expressed by persons in academicsettings and those working in business and industry.Originality/value These research findings have implications for the development of curricula atthe international level.Keywords Curriculum development, Industrial engineering, Undergraduates, Delphi methodPaper type Research paperIntroductionThe birth of new technology and changes in types of industries in the USA and abroadhave created opportunities for industrial engineers to work in industrial sectors thatspan far beyond the traditional area of manufacturing where the discipline of industrialengineering was originally founded. Given the fact that recent trends in industrialgrowth are towards nontraditional industries, particularly information technology andservice-related industries, it is anticipated that the percentage of industrial engineersworking outside of the traditional manufacturing industries will exceed the percentageThe current issue and full text archive of this journal is available /0040-0912.htmThis study is a part of the NSF funded research project entitled “Reengineering theUndergraduate Industrial Engineering Program.”Enhancing theundergraduateIE curriculum45Education TrainingVol. 49 No. 1, 2007pp. 45-55qEmerald Group Publishing Limited0040-0912DOI 10.1108/00400910710729875of those working inside this field in the next several years. From the 2000 Census data, 38percent of industrial engineers work outside of traditional durable goodsmanufacturing, with a high percentage (12 percent) working in service industries(Furterer et al., 2004). While the types of industries where industrial engineers areworking are evolving, changes in the types of roles and responsibilities that IndustrialEngineers are performing within these industries are occurring as well. Given theseanticipated changes in industries and consequently in the types of assigned roles,Industrial Engineering (IE) programs need to revise their curriculum to educate andprepare students to meet the future needs of todays rapidly changing industrialworkplace.The Engineer of 2020 study, by the National Academy of Engineering (2003)demonstrated the need for all engineers to acquire attributes that are vastly differentfrom the attributes that current engineering undergraduates acquire in their curriculum.Some of the important attributes are: strong analytical skills, practical ingenuity,creativity to synthesize, understanding a system perspective, having a customer focus,and awareness of a societal context and the impact of being a global citizen. The authorspremise is that we must drastically reengineer the industrial engineering curriculumacross the nation to ensure that our students acquire attributes that can help them besuccessful in their careers in this new century.To ensure that undergraduate students are adequately prepared to meet the futureindustrial and technological advances, the Industrial Engineering and ManagementSystems department at the University of Central Florida, with its Industrial AdvisoryBoard, has developed a comprehensive multi-faceted plan to reengineer the IEUndergraduate Education Program. The effort involves making significant changes inthe curriculum, transforming faculty instructional strategies, introducing newtechnology in the classrooms while providing additional experiential opportunitiesfor students, as well as developing aggressive recruiting strategies to attract studentsinto the IE profession. As part of this research study, we will develop an IE curriculumthat can be used as a national model for the 101 IE undergraduate curriculums in theUSA, and provide for guidance for international industrial engineering-relatedprograms of study. Similar to the Engineer of 2020 study that used future scenariosincluding a global focus, our study also identified desired characteristics and emergingtopics that are important for an international curriculum. We will use these desiredcharacteristics and emerging topics to develop the curriculum requirements andassessment strategies that ensure that the desired characteristics are met by ourundergraduates.It is imperative that future IE graduates have courses and learning experiences thatdevelop their knowledge base, skill set, and work experiences in the area ofnontraditional industries, such as information technology and service relatedindustries. To effectively perform roles and responsibilities, industrial engineersmust be equipped with knowledge and experiences in engineering management andleadership as well. It was very important to conduct a research study that sampled awide cross section of faculty and industry professionals across the USA to identify thecharacteristics or attributes of an undergraduate industrial engineer desired byemployers of our graduates, and to determine the emerging topic areas that should beincorporated into the reengineered curriculum.A modified three round Delphi study was employed in which respondents were askedto rate the questionnaire items according to their importance in the workplace. Thepopulation surveyed included faculty from many universities offering an undergraduateET49,146degree in IE as of May 2004 and industry professionals from different industry sectorsincluding some members of industrial advisory boards of IE departments. Theresponses from faculty were compared with the responses from industry professionalsto determine if differences existed between the perspectives of each group.Purpose and research questionnaireThe primary purpose of this study was to identify the desired characteristics of anundergraduate industrial engineer as an entry-level employee and to determine theemerging topic areas that should be incorporated into the reengineered curriculum.This research study will help determine the future focus on curriculum development todevelop a model that can be applied nationally and internationally to ensure that IEundergraduates acquire the attributes that will enhance systems and processes on aglobal basis. Also, the IE curriculum model will enable IE academic programs to bemore responsive to the needs and requirements of industry, particularly the increasingnontraditional industry sectors such as information technology (IT), health care, andservice as well as industrial engineers roles in engineering management andleadership. This study will also determine the depth of the emerging topics, how theyshould be combined and integrated into the curriculum, and how the existing coursesshould be restructured for new topic inclusion.To reengineer the curriculum, two important sets of questions were asked in thesurvey. The first set emphasized the characteristics desired for industrial engineers toembody after having completed their undergraduate education. The second set ofquestions asked the respondents to rate each emerging topic according to itsimportance for Industrial Engineers to learn in their undergraduate curriculum.MethodologyThe Delphi technique is a systematic procedure which collates the opinions of a diversegroup of experts located in different geographical areas whose opinions are importantfor decision analysis. Through the Delphi technique, different responses and views areobtained on the underlying problem resulting in the generation of new ideas andunique suggestions, and eventually gains consensus on the findings among a panel ofexperts. A conventional Delphi method starts with an open-ended questionnaire andthe participants are asked to respond to the questions. A second questionnairecomposed of collated information and calculated statistics obtained from the firstround questionnaire is sent out asking respondents to potentially revise their opinions,or agree with the rankings obtained regarding the problem under study. This processcontinues until consensus is gained among respondents or the research teamdetermines that they have acquired sufficient data for the study.Many researchers have used different variations of the Delphi technique to rank andrate the relative importance of the desired attributes and characteristics of universitygraduates (Snoke and Underwood, 1999), to identify the competent curriculum contentsand topics for undergraduate and graduate education programs (Seagle and Iverson,2002; Philips et al., 2003; Gatchell et al., 2004; Shah, 2003, 2004), and even both (Simonet al., 2004). For example, Shah (2003, 2004) recently did an extensive research study todiscover and describe the competency areas considered most important in the disciplineof engineering management to update and validate the curriculum for the Master ofScience in Engineering Management degree at Eastern Michigan University. In anotherstudy, Snoke and Underwood (1999) conducted an Australian national study to examinethe generic attributes of graduates of Australian undergraduate degree programs withEnhancing theundergraduateIE curriculum47majors in information systems. Wright etal. (2002) investigated the desired attributes ofgraduates from apparel design programs using Q-methodology. They also examined thedisparity of thoughts between the faculty and industry professionals.Several variations of the Delphi technique are found in the literature. It isreported that it is very difficult for the respondents to rank the questionnaireitems when the number of them is quite large (Watson, 1989). Thus, in this case,the respondents were asked to rate rather than rank the questionnaire items. Afew researchers developed the Delphi technique by sending the second roundquestionnaire to the new respondents who had not been involved in the first roundof the study (for example, see Watson (1989). This modification will facilitate thegroup decision-making process by saving a great amount of experts time andeffort, which is probably one of the main drawbacks of Delphi, and by distributingthe manpower consumption among the existing experts. On the other hand, thismodified Delphi can explore the ideas of the existing experts more thoroughly andgain more information and distinct views.In the first round of the study, the questionnaire draft with a previously identifiedlist of characteristics and emerging topics designed by the research team as an initialquestion list. The sources of information for this preliminary list include:.curricular topics covered by schools offering an IE program within the USA; and.topics covered by published literature on IE.Thereafter, the preliminary list was reviewed by a group of faculty representingdifferent areas of IE discipline for modification and improvement. The improvedquestionnaire was distributed at the Industrial Engineering Research Conference(IERC) to about 400 potential participants, including faculty from many universitiesand industry professionals from different industry sectors. They were asked to providean importance rating for the desired characteristics that they would like anundergraduate IE graduate to have, and an importance rating for emerging topics thatthey believe should be part of an IE undergraduate curriculum. A five-point Likertscale, in order of increasing importance, was employed where 1 very unimportant,2 unimportant, 3 somewhat unimportant/somewhat important, 4 important,5 very important. Sufficient space was also provided for the respondents to addadditional desired characteristics and emerging topics, or to provide any comments orsuggestions at the end of the questionnaire. Out of about 400 questionnairesdistributed, 62 completed questionnaires were received, resulting in a participation rateof 15.5 percent. In total, 38 respondents, including 22 (58 percent) from universities and16 (42 percent) from industry, provided some demographic information which wasoptional for the respondents to include. The average importance rating, standarddeviation, and percentage level of being important or very important were calculatedfor each questionnaire item.In round two, the desired characteristics and emerging topics with quite lowimportance ratings were eliminated and a few suggested additional desiredcharacteristics and emerging topics were added to the previous questionnaire. Themodified questionnaire with the same format was sent via e-mail to about 300 facultyand a few industrial advisory boards of IE departments who had not participated in thefirst questionnaire. In total, 46 completed questionnaires were received, including 30from faculty with a participation rate of about 10 percent and 16 from industryprofessionals, that is, members of industrial advisory boards. The responses fromround one and round two were combined together resulting in 108 completedET49,148questionnaires overall. Analysis of the collected data for the study consisted ofcalculating a percentage level of being important or very important for eachquestionnaire item. Two other statistical analyses were also performed on the collecteddata. A one-proportion test was performed for each of the desired characteristics andemerging topics to determine whether it is important or not. This is an appropriate testfor our analysis as it allows building a confidence interval for the true proportion of aspecific outcome (success). Responses of very unimportant, unimportant andsomewhat unimportant/somewhat important were combined together (Set 1), andresponses of important and very important were combined together as well (Set 2), todivide the responses into two different sets. The average proportion of Set 1 was thencalculated to evaluate a null hypothesis H0 and its alternative H1. H0 and H1 wereformulated as follows:H0. The true proportion of Set 2 is equal to the hypothesized value (0.5 in thisstudy).H1. The true proportion of Set 1 is greater than the hypothesized value.To determine whether an item was important or not, the lower bound of the confidenceinterval of the true proportion of Set 2 was used to accept or reject the null hypothesis.In the second statistical analysis, a Chi-square test was used to investigate whether ornot there is independence between industry responses and education responses foreach item. Using the actual observed frequencies in each scale from both industry andeducation, the Chi-square test makes a comparison with the frequencies one wouldexpect if there were no relationship of significance between the two populations. Inother words, it assesses whether the observed frequencies in both population samplesare different enough to overcome a certain probability (a 0:05) that they are due tosampling error.In round three, the final ranking of the 25 most important emerging topics as well asthe 16 most important desired characteristics was carried out. These were derived fromthe results from a panel of 16 experts, including nine faculty and seven industryprofessionals who participated in the previous round. They were asked to provide arank and a weight (1-100) for the important emerging topics and desiredcharacteristics, having referred to the summary of the responses to the previousquestionnaire obtained from rounds one and two. In this round, the goal was obtainingconsensus and final ranking on the emerging topics and desired characteristics.Findings and discussionsSome statistical results on desired characteristics and emerging topics obtained fromthe combination of responses collected in round one and round two (overall 108completed questionnaires) are listed in Tables I and II, respectively. The desiredcharacteristics and emerging topics are ranked in order of importance, from most toleast important, based on the percent of ratings in the important and very importantcategories for each questionnaire item across all responses (given as italics) includingrespondents from both education and industry and those who have not provideddemographic information in round one, called others in this study. The last columnprovides the lower bound of confidence interval (CI) with significance level of 0.05. Thevalues in this column were used in the one proportion test as described earlier in themethodology section.Enhancing theundergraduateIE curriculum49Looking at the results shown in Table I, all desired characteristics, except Java or Cprogramming, are important. Adaptable problem solving skills are found to be the mostimportant characteristic, followed by process evaluation/analyses andquantitative/analytical abilities, respectively. It is interesting to note that teamworkskills are the most important desired characteristics from the industry perspective, andt