THE EVALUATION OF PARTNERSHIP IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION
ABSTRACT
After defining partnership in engineering education as closely related to technological partnership this paper presents the major elements of the Brazilian Universidade Federal Fluminense's Program of Interdisciplinary Development in Engineering (PRODINE). The analytical evaluation framework for PRODINE is emphasized with its qualitative as well as quantitative aspects.
INTRODUCTION
Technological partnership has been pointed out as a major force behind the development of technological capabilities of firms and countries. A recent workshop promoted by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has reviewed a number of concepts and practices associated to partnership in various parts of the word [UNCTAD, 1996]. Brazil is one of the many countries where a serious effort has been made towards implementing and disseminating the idea of technology partnership, particularly in what concerns small and medium-size enterprises [Taralli, 1996].
A good firm-oriented definition of technological partnership can be read as follows:
"Technological partnerships are those inter-firm partnership that have a technology element in them, although they are often directed to a variety of objectives (e.g. market access, commercialization, finance), and that thereby enhance the level and depth of the technological capabilities of the participating firms". [Pietrobelli, 1996]
As an extension of the above definition one can therefore define partnership in engineering education as a partnership among at least two organizations directly related to engineering education. These organizations can be academic departments, engineering schools, universities, or any sort of educational organization. These partnerships are oriented towards solving engineering education problems caused by the demands on the globalization of engineering knowledge. As such, the concept of partnership in engineering education is closely related to that of technological partnership.
Not only partnership in engineering education and technological partnership but also cooperative research and benchmarking are end-of-the-century practices that reflect the need for active exchanges and joint work among productive agents in the global economy. These practices must be consistent with the multiple, conflicting objectives of the organizations involved. Once the set of objectives is made explicit evaluation is the means by which decision making processes are fed with relevant data. Evaluation tools are thus foremost needed in order to serve as directives for action and resource allocation.
In this paper we look at the design of the process of analytical evaluation for cooperative practices. By focusing on the cooperative project on re-organizing Engineering education at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) in Brazil we outline the evaluation framework in use there.
THE CONTEXT OF EVALUATION
Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) is a Brazilian federal university founded in 1960 in the City of Niteroi, in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The City of Niteroi is located at the Guanabara Bay seashore just opposite to the City of Rio de Janeiro, capital of the State of Rio de Janeiro. The cities of Niteroi and Rio de Janeiro are directly connected by ferryboats as well as by an 8 miles, 3,363 feet long, continuous box and plate girder bridge, with a center span of 984 feet and a span on each side of 656 feet.
UFF has presently around 20,000 students, undergraduate and graduate, and a School of Engineering with the following majors: agricultural engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, metallurgical engineering, production engineering, telecommunications engineering, and chemical engineering.
In 1996 the Science and Technology Center and the School of Engineering of UFF launched an interdisciplinary, medium range project whose key objective is to re-engineer the teaching of engineering at the university. That project is titled PRODINE, which stands for 'Program of Interdisciplinary Development in Engineering' in Portuguese. The framework for PRODINE is the REENGE Program, described in this Conference in the paper by Longo, Loureiro and do Carmo (1997).
UFF's PRODINE relies on the basic philosophy of invigorating the undergraduate teaching of engineering through a vertical integration of that teaching with high-school teaching and with graduate teaching and research. The scenario for that vertical integration is not supposed to ignore the fast development of science and technology as well as concrete demands from the nation's productive sector. As such, PRODINE comprises the following three basic methodological experiments: (a) introduction to engineering; (b) introduction to technology; and (c) the sub-project of integrated undergraduate engineering studies. Those methodological experiments are supported by different infrastructure elements of the university, of which the most important ones are the following: (i) the information technology infrastructure; (ii) the library system; (iii) the quality control laboratory. In particular, the interdisciplinary nature of PRODINE is provided by the following modules: (1) basic physics; (2) transport phenomena; (3) applied mechanics and robotics; (4) automation; (5) materials; (6) decision aiding and technology management; (7) water resource and soils engineering; (8) metrology and quality; (9) basic chemistry; (10) mathematics; (11) metallurgy; (12) rheology and alternative sources of energy; and (13) linkages to high-school teaching and to the recycling of high-school teachers.
55 university instructors are actively involved with PRODINE and the level of these instructors vary from assistant to full professors of both the Science and Technology and the Exact Sciences centers. Chairmen of every university department that has at least one instructor participating in the project have agreed to support this participation. PRODINE is therefore a real world example of partnership in Engineering Education that is expected to substantially modify existing concepts and practices in a major Brazilian university. A management structure has been designed and implemented for carrying PRODINE, including the project's monitoring and evaluation. We will explain the design of PRODINE's evaluation process in the following section of this paper.
THE ANALYTICAL EVALUATION PROCESS OF PRODINE
The diagram below shows the managing structure of the PRODINE project:
Evaluation of a project with the complexity of PRODINE, with consequences on teaching, research, and extension activities, could not rely on a single criteria. On the other hand, although the nature of this evaluation must be multi-criteria and multi-agent, it would be naïve to try to use a single quantitative method for the evaluation. Therefore it has been decided that monitoring and evaluating PRODINE must be ran on the basis of periodically collecting relevant data and promoting organized group discussions with a view to syntheses. Those syntheses should allow for reviewing project directives and also facilitating better, continuing resource allocation. A managing committee comprising members of practically all academic departments involved with the project has been pointed out as responsible for the activities of monitoring and evaluation.
Monitoring and evaluating PRODINE has thus been conceived as the process by which partial measures of performance are periodically collected and analyzed. Analysis in itself is performed taking as reference the overall objective of the project. Monitoring the project is accomplish through the following partial products and actions: (A) trimonthly financial reports; (B) semi-annual progress reports for every module and for every experiment; (C) annual evaluation of the overall project by an ad hoc commission; (D) periodical meetings of participating students and instructors; (E) integrating seminars and workshops; (F) teleconferences accessible through the Brazilian engineering network; (G) meetings of PRODINE's managing committee.
There are however intangible and very important dimensions that cannot be overemphasized in the monitoring and evaluation of PRODINE and that require a multi-criteria, multi-agent approach. Since the project implies the cooperation of various academic units and people (i.e. the various agents of crucial qualitative changes to be introduced in the education of future engineers) with backgrounds from fields such as engineering, physics, chemistry, mathematics, library science and so forth, particularly in what concerns the methodological experiments, a set of flexible but reliable indicators is being designed that will reflect these multiple dimensions of PRODINE and the pioneering nature of the project. The framework for such a family of indicators comes from the well-established field of multicriteria decision analysis [Roy, 1985].
PRODINE is the first initiative in Universidade Federal Fluminense towards multidisciplinary cooperation outside the more constrained limits of pedagogy and teaching. As such, all partners believe that the project will reach the nature of technological knowledge in itself. The main products from PRODINE shall be reflected not only on the university as a whole but also on every individual partner. These products are essentially the objects of our monitoring and evaluation.
REFERENCES
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