Teaching Systems Engineering by Examining Engineering Education Systems

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In recent years, there has been a growing demand in industry for undergraduate engineers to develop a stronger understanding of systems engineering concepts and principles. In some industry domains, such as aerospace engineering or healthcare engineering, the projected need for systems engineers far outstrips the projected supply of US trained engineers with appropriate undergraduate exposure to systems engineering topics or projects. However, it is difficult to provide undergraduates with an effective educational experience to a complex engineering environment (such as evaluation and improvement of an entire hospital network, or development of a new space vehicle assembly process) due to the size and complexity of the system. Perhaps equally important is that students rarely have substantial exposure to such systems before graduation. This paper describes attempts to provide students with the opportunity to define, explore, and assess a complex engineering system for which they supposedly all have direct experience: engineering education. In essence, an engineering curriculum is an integration of systems at several levels of aggregation: design, evaluation, and improvement efforts can be described at the scale of the individual class, semester course, or undergraduate / graduate major. However, two issues limit students’ understanding of their own experience as a systems engineering application. A lack of presentation of engineering concepts in a systems engineering context predisposes students to process material in a sequential aggregation (the model of presenting lecture material in a class). In addition, a lack of transparency of goals and processes may prevent students from understanding faculty, employer, or other university perspectives on the processes, outcomes, and success criteria of the engineering education enterprise. Examples of these issues are presented from the context of courses in industrial engineering.