July 2004
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Newsletter for July 2004 |
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IACEE Secretary General's Corner This is an exciting time for IACEE. At our recent World Conference on Engineering Education, the IACEE Council approved important changes that I believe will lead IACEE to having a great impact on the future of continuing engineering education. IACEE now has Council officers specifically assigned to areas important to its members. Feng Changgen is the vice president for special interest groups; Frank Burris is the vice president for membership development; Gerardo Ferrando is the Vice President for Projects, and Colin Leung is the Vice President for the WCCEE. Having an officer in charge of each area will improve the focus of the Council, and ensure we are meeting members' needs. A new project on benchmarking is already underway. Spearheaded by Patricio Montesinos of the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, the "Understanding International BEST Practices" project aims to observe the different tendencies and manners in which CEE business is organized, managed, and measured all over the world by IACEE members. I encourage you to learn more about this project by visiting www.iacee-upv.com. IACEE is also developing a process to accredit CEE programs. Under the leadership of Feng Changgen, IACEE is conducting a test pilot in accrediting CEE programs at 25 academic institutions in China. This project will be help to determine what criteria is used in the evaluations. We are looking into the future for the WCCEE as well. At the May meeting, the Council voted to hold the 2006 WCCEE in Vienna at the Vienna University of Technology. VUT is a fine academic institution, and Vienna is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Held from 19-21 April 2006, the conference promises to be most informative. The Council also voted to hold the 2008 WCCEE in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, completing the cycle of holding the WCCEE in each part of the world. There are many exciting things happening in IACEE, and I encourage you to take part in the activities. As always, I welcome your comments and suggestions. Frank L.
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Papers
of Interest to There were many papers of interest that were presented at the recent WCCEE in Tokyo this past May 2004. Over the next several newsletters, we will be spotlighting a few of those papers presented. This month, we would like to focus on papers that discussed distance learning. Please click on each title to read the full paper - note that you will need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to read the files (to download a free copy, click here). If you have a paper that you would like to share with the IACEE community, please contact the newsletter at info@iacee.org.
Through an analysis of the characteristics and advantages of modern distance education and a survey of the status quo of modern distance education in China, this paper discusses the necessity and feasibility of establishing a distance education system (network) in continuing education and puts forward some detailed assumptions of the establishment: hardware environment, teaching mode, etc. Design
and Evaluation of Online Delivery Systems for Continuing Engineering
Education This research focuses on modeling of an interactive online delivery system in support of continuing engineering education through an introduction of three major system modules: knowledge management module, client/server applications module, and group information sharing module. Semantic
Web for Re-usability in Open and Distance Learning Using the web for educational purposes has changed in the last years. The creation of content has been also increasingly considerable. Universities in particular, have developed many courses in many different formats, many of them starting from zero, and many quite similar. The
Changing Role of the Research University and the Future of Distance
Education This paper explores the changes to higher education brought about by the ubiquitous use of improved communications technology and how that technology, in the long run, may undermine the mission and purpose of Research I universities. Additionally, it explores various ways in which distance education can play a viable role in the future of higher education in the United States. Article on Distance Education/Technology An Indian engineer is clamoring for that country's government to help encourage continuing education across the board, particularly via the internet. Sunil Kr Sarangi's paper "Continuing Engineering Education through E-learning: a Strategy for Development," bemoans the "brain drain" in recent years on India and calls for the government and the private sector to make up for recent shortcomings in undergraduate and postgraduate engineering. Sarangi, who works for the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur's Cryogenic Engineering Centre, believes e-learning, taking classes through the internet, is the best way to compensate for shortcomings in the country. Sarangi is particularly concerned with the decline in quality of education that has coincided with an increase in engineering colleges in India, and the rate at which the country's brightest engineers are leaving the country for greener pastures in the United States and Canada. For
more information: www.cdacindia.com/html/pdf/Session6.4.pdf. |
CONFERENCES: IACEE is pleased to announce that the 10th World Conference on Continuing Engineering Education will be held in Vienna, Austria, on April 19-21, 2006. The conference will take place at the Vienna University of Technology, which is situated in the heart of Vienna. We encourage
you to put this conference on your calendars. For more information, please
contact Franz Reichl at wccee@ai.tuwien.ac.at.
8-10
September 27 September
- 1 October 3-6 November For more information on future conferences, please see http://www.iacee.org. Do you have an interesting project in the field of engineering education that you would like to share with fellow IACEE members? We want to showcase papers or information from IACEE members in this newsletter. To submit articles/items of information, please contact Jennifer Johnson. To submit items for the newsletter, please contact Jennifer Johnson at: j.johnson@iacee.org. View past newsletters at: www.iacee.org. IACEE Web Site:
www.iacee.org President Vice
President Secretary
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