Developing global engineers: a comparison between Chile, Scotland, and the United States

Engineering-accredited programmes are reviewed every 4-5 years by professional bodies with the aim of assuring standards that guarantee that graduate engineers can fulfil the highest technical demands of the industry workforce in order to achieve a sustainable economy and society. The approaches to develop these require global engineering competences (GECs), such as international and intercultural teamwork, language skills, critical thinking, and ethical and human-centered problem solving, are proving insufficient to meet the emerging challenges that this century's society is facing. To develop these GECs, engineering programmes have been working on including physical and virtual mobility such as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) together with other experiential learning interventions in order to provide the necessary requirements to become a global engineer. The aim of this practice paper is to compare and to discuss how three different universities, located in Chile, Scotland, and the United States have designed their engineering programmes to develop global engineers. This research provides preliminary results, based on an auto-ethnographic approach to analyse the curriculum design approaches and structures, that highlight opportunities for collaborative interdisciplinary experiences as well as more country- and institution-specific approaches (Engineers Without Borders) that support the development of these GECs. Analysis showed that the majority of the GECs are achieved by the three universities, however Virginia Tech is the only university that explicitly encourages and motivates other students through an assignment and cultural simulation activity. This research is part of a larger investigation that will analyse how engineering graduates perceive their development of GECs.