Turned from knowledge-based to innovation-based: Introduction of Emerging Engineering Education in China

This Research to Practice WIP (Work In Progress) paper presents an innovative engineering education concept, Emerging Engineering Education. The fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0) has promoted the all-around transformation of education in engineering. To cope with the changes caused by Industry 4.0, the Ministry of education of China announced a new strategic guideline named ”Emerging Engineering Education (3E)”. The main purposes of 3E are: 1) proposing a new concept to establish an innovative, comprehensive and fully-cycled engineering education; 2) forming a new structure to combine the new and traditional engineering majors; 3) exploring a new model to cultivate the engineering technological talents; 4) developing a high-quality evaluation to improve international competitiveness of engineering education; 5) constructing a new system to strengthen engineering education. The main approaches to build 3E are inheritance and innovation, integration and emergence, coordination and sharing, which means to transform subject-oriented to industrial demand-oriented, transform subject independent to subject integrated, transform the role of adapting the requirements of application to the role of leading to the development of industry. This paper mainly focused on the innovation of 3E and discussed some methods of how to cultivate compound, creative and applied engineering talents.