INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR
CONTINUING ENGINEERING EDUCATION

Newsletter for September 2003

IACEE President's Corner

Dear IACEE Members:

This is written in September after the May Council meeting in Valencia. Due to the SARS outbreak, the Council could not accept the generous offer from the Vice-President Prof. Feng and from the China Association for Science and Technology to meet in China in mid-May. Therefore, the Council met in Valencia, at the end of May, thanks to the prompt and kind response from Dr. Patricio Montesinos and the Universidad Politecnica de Valencia. To the first and second hosts, my sincere thanks in the name of IACEE.

The meeting in Valencia had a high attendance and a lot of work was done, besides the friendly social hospitality of our host. The transfer of Headquarters was completed, the call for bids for the 10th WCCEE was opened, IACEE Bylaws were updated, tasks were assigned for council members, a Nominating Committee was established, the program for the 9th WCCEE was detailed and strategic decisions were discussed and agreed.

I would like to call your attention to the decision to have a database of experts within IACEE that could provide consultancy within the CEE area. The next steps consist of collecting data about IACEE members' expertise, disseminate through engineering
organizations the existence of this added value of IACEE and to provide consultancy within the CEE scope. This is a challenge for IACEE members and its leadership but the possible results are worth the effort. In the near future you will be contacted by Headquarters to cooperate in the creation of this added value for members and for IACEE.

Let us work together to improve the performance of the association.

Alfredo Soeiro
IACEE President
avsoeiro@fe.up.pt

Award Nominations

Every three years at the World Conference on Continuing Engineering Education, IACEE presents two Awards recognizing international achievement in continuing engineering education. For more information, or to download a nomination form, please click on the title of each award.

IACEE Joseph M. Biedenbach Distinguished Lectureship Award

The Joseph M. Biedenbach Distinguished Lectureship Award was established in 1991 to honor the memory of Joseph M. Biedenbach. Professor Biedenbach was one of the initiators of IACEE and the World Conferences on Continuing Engineering Education.

Glen L. Martin Award for Corporate Leadership in Continuing Engineering Education

The Martin Award was established to honor the memory of Glen L. Martin, a founding corporate member of the IACEE Council, whose tireless efforts to promote corporate involvement in engineering education spanned his career. It honors a company whose support for continuing engineering education demonstrates world class leadership and whose continuing engineering education practices and programs serve as models for companies throughout the world.

Please contact Colin C.F. Leung, chair of the IACEE Awards Committee, should you have any questons regarding the nomination process for these awards.

At its May meeting in Valencia, Spain the 2001-2004 IACEE Council appointed the Nominating Committee for the 21 Council seats for 2004-2007. The Nominating Committee consists of Past President John P. Klus, Past President Javier Jimenez Espriu, former Secretary General Markku Markkula, with Past President Frank E. Burris serving as Chair. At the 10th World Conference on Continuing Engineering Education in Tokyo in May 2004 the General Membership Meeting will elect a new Council and a new President for the next triennium. The new Council will then elect four Vice Presidents to serve with the President on the Executive Committee. Each of the four Vice Presidents will have special responsibilities in one of the following areas: Membership Development, Special Interest Groups, Projects, and World Conferences on CEE.

The 21 Council members must be IACEE members in good standing, who have a demonstrated interest in moving the association forward in the early years of the 21st century. Council members must also commit to attend the annual Council meeting and have sufficient financial resources to support their travel between home and the meeting site. The five Executive Committee members must have additional resources to participate in at least one face-to-face Executive Committee meeting at a location and time other than the annual Council meeting.

Please submit your nomination(s) by February 1, 2004 to Dr. Frank E. Burris, UCLA Extension, Suite 540, 10995 LeConte Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90024-2883, USA. Communication via e-mail is preferred at fburris@uclaextension.edu.

Papers on Continuing Engineering Education

Web-based learning is the wave of the future for all forms of engineering education. Each institution, however, has a different approach to e-learning and e-teaching. The papers chosen for this month's newsletter all examine the various digital forms of teaching and 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 iacee@asee.org.

Smart Recommendation for an Evolving E-Learning System (presented at AIED 2003)
The majority of current web-based learning systems are closed learning environments where courses and learning materials are fixed and the only dynamic aspect is the organization of the material that can be adapted to allow a relatively individualized learning environment. Although learners do not have direct interaction with the open Web, the system can retrieve relevant information related to them and their situated learning characteristics.

A Successful Model for Web-Based Engineering Technology Education
The attrition in this distance education program is expectedly higher than the resident program, but so is the level of the performace of its students. When subjected to the same set of performance tests, those students who participated in the Web-based curriculum consistently outperformed the resident students who took the same classes at the same time.

e-Learning and e-Teaching: Meeting the Challenges of ICT
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) has largely changed the learning milieu. It has affected everyone in the academic community. It allows for a change in required competencies among learners, teachers and administrators. It promotes the development of new educational contents and deliveries. It necessitates a change in the educational organization and infrastructure to support for learning networks brought about.

Project-Oriented, Internet-Based Learning in the Field of Control Engineering
While control engineering is taught since decades in nearly all engineering programs, most control engineering courses classically divide the overall task into small subtasks. These subtasks can be prepared and solved independently and thus avoid to put too much complexity into each single step. Though this is smart and in many cases necessary as well, there is always the immanent risk of not considering the overall dependencies and thus missing the final goal.

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Article on Distance Education/Technology

Lifelong Learning Is Necessary for Career Success, According to Survey - In April 2003, IEEE-USA carried an online survey on continuing engineering education. Ninety engineers responded. While their feedback does not represent all engineers, it does speak for a group who are concerned enough about career-long learning to express their opinions voluntarily, making their responses significant. Both engineers and continuing education providers can learn from what they had to say.

Spotlight on Members

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.

9th World Conference on Continuing Engineering Education

The 9th WCCEE, sponsored by IACEE and co-sponsored by the Science Council of Japan and the Japanese Society for Engineering Education, will be held in Tokyo on 15-20 May 2004. With the theme of "Strategy of Continuing Engineering Education for International Competence and Cooperation," the conference will address such topics as case studies for CPD, CEE in developing countries, and knowledge management. Abstracts and workshop proposals are due by 1 October 2003. Please visit the conference website by clicking here.

CONFERENCES:

29 September - 1 October
14th Annual Conference for AAEE, Australia
Engineering Education for a Sustainable Future

6-10 October
ASE 2003, Canada
Automated Software Engineering 2003 / 18th IEEE International Conference

4-6 November
People in Control 2003, the Netherlands
An International Conference on Engineering Human Factors Solutions

11-13 November
CAINE 2003, USA
16th International Conference on Computer Applications in Industry and Engineering

27-28 November
FIDJI 2003, Luxembourg
International Workshop on scientiFic engIneering of Distributed Java applIcations

3-5 December
AFCON 2003, South Africa
1st African Control Conference

4-6 December
ICECON 2003, India
Instrumentation & Control Engineering Conference

8-9 December
7th Triennial AEESEAP
Enhancing Engineering Education and Training a University - Industry - Government Partnership

8-10 December
IRFD World Forum on Information Society, Switzerland
Digital Divide, Global Development & Information Society

10-12 December
APSEC 2003, Thailand
10th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference

10-12 December
ANZIIS 2003, Australia
8th Australian & New Zealand Conference on Intelligent Information Systems

10-13 December
WISE 2003, Australia
4th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering

11-12 December
SEFI - CEE, Sweden
Continuing Engineering Education as a Business.
Continuing Education Tools for the Engineer of Tomorrow

28-30 January 2004
SICPRO '04, Russia
Third International Conference on System Identification and Control Problems

For more information on future conferences, please see http://www.iacee.org.

IACEE
1818 N Street, NW
Suite 600
Washington, DC 20036 USA

Web Site: http://www.iacee.org
E-mail:
info@iacee.org

President
Alfredo A.V. Soeiro
Vice President
Feng Changgen