Introducing broad skills in higher engineering education: The Patents and Standards course at Eindhoven University of Technology

Abstract

Over the years, the engineering profession has changed and evolved. e expectations that employers and society have of engineers nowadays are dierent from those of even a few decades ago, and universities have been trying to respond to these changing needs by rethinking and redesigning their courses. is paper describes the large-scale e orts by Eindhoven University of Technology to redesign its entire undergraduate program. More specifically, it elaborates on a series of three courses on patents and standards to illustrate how new academic innovations have been put into practice while also reporting a critical evaluation of these reforms. We conclude that the undergraduate program redesign has led to an almost 50% rise in intake. Additionally, despite conrming our belief that this is a better way to train engineers, the new approach has also been challenging and not always appreciated by students as much as we would like. In regards to the patents and standards courses in particular, the e orts to increase workload while maintaining student satisfaction levels eventually proved to be successful.