Today, it is National Engineers Day (September 15, 2021) - that marks Bharat Ratna M Visvesvaraya’s 160th birthday - who was born in 1861 in the Muddenahalli village of Karnataka.
However, in the present times engineering has become a cross-curricular study area and people are taking about Educational Engineering, Social Engineering, Human engineering, gender inclusive engineering curriculum development, ergonomics and many more similar studies.
Here, I reproduce my article on educational engineering as a plea to start special educational engineering courses so as to design educational practices on the principles of engineering.
What is educational engineering all about?
Dr. Lalit Kishore: Meri News[1]
Many new areas of study and professional practice are coming up to break the boundary between education and other disciplines such as educational science, educational technology, educational engineering, educational therapy and many more.
Currently some educational engineers have become available to make for the missing links between engineering and education. According to WH Zaggle, an educational engineer employs the process for innovation and engineering research into practical applications. Developed and trained educational engineering requires a blending of creativity, ingenuity and innovation skills to build tools for teaching. Further, a trained and seasoned educational engineer has a valued place in the current global quest for real innovation and real transformational opportunities in the classrooms, he observes.
Another expert WW Charters stresses the need for conducting experiments and inventing new methods for the application of theories to address specific issues in learning and teaching. He says, "The well-trained educational engineer assembles pertinent facts wherever found, and uses the best techniques in solving his problems of construction." He suggests that along with insights into pedagogy, prospective educational engineers require training in operational research, laboratory methods, and other core instructional engineering subjects. He feels that an educational engineer is responsible specifically for improving methodology rather than just compiling and analyzing statistics. Thus, an educational engineer works in the areas of construction of efficient programs, methods, and techniques.
Likewise, RC Anderson questions the common practice of moving straight from research to classroom practice without the intermediate engineering process and stresses the need for a new role in education that of an educational engineer. In other words, there is a need to put in place the critical missing component between theory and application in the form of educational engineering.
Zaggle puts forth that in educational engineering, the basic engineering skills are married to the basic performing and pedagogical skills to give birth to innovative methods and designs.
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