Abstract:

With the increasing globalization of the corporate and educational environments, there are more and more opportunities to work on projects as a member of international and interdisciplinary teams and is a demand for the acquisition of synthetic problem-solving skills. In addition, one of the important elements in project management on international team members is the ability to understand different cultures. For example, according to a comparison of the seven items on E. Meyer's Culture MapーCommunicating, Evaluating, Persuading, Leading, Deciding, Trusting, Disagreeing, and Scheduling, these items vary widely from country to country, and the variation in thinking is random. In other words, if team members only act by their own country's way of thinking, conflicts among team members will occur, and it will not be possible to successfully solve problems. To solve these problems, it is important to design engineering education starting from problem finding in consideration of different cultural environments and to develop assessment methodology, which are challenging.
Authors have developed an engineering education program based on systems thinking to learn synthetic problem-solving skills with cross-cultural understanding.

This program is called the Cross-cultural Engineering Project (CEP), which is a project exercise in a multicultural and multidisciplinary environment. The developed CEP started in 2013, and consists of the following three areas and issues, and has been expanded and implemented on a global scale.
- CEP@KMUTT in Thailand: Glocal problem; 172 participants,
- CEP@SIT in Japan: Cooperation between industry and local communities; 220 participants,
- CEP@FCT in Portugal: Innovative Creation, held; 80 participants.

In this study, validation of the issues of each CEP project and its educational effects was conducted based on outcomes assessment, self-assessments (differences between pre- and post-assessments), and peer assessment of team members in face-to-face projects (a total of 472 participants) conducted between 2017 and 2019. The items of outcomes evaluation were Creativity, Usefulness, Completion, Feasibility, and Achievement to the Goal. The items for self-assessment and peer assessment were Work in multi-culture and interdisciplinary team, Engineering Design, System Thinking, Engineering Methodology, and Leadership. These items were rated on a 5-point scale. First, the self-assessment results showed that the participants obtained a high ability in System Thinking (difference between pre- and post-assessment: 0.78), and second, an ability in Work in multi-culture and interdisciplinary team (0.76). Moreover, there was a significant difference (5% level of significance) between CEP@FCT and CEP@KMUTT in the acquisition of engineering design skills. This is since CEP@FCT introduces the Kando (impression) understanding process to support innovation creation. Next, an assessment of the outcomes was conducted using the FY2019 outcome evaluation with a confidence interval of 95%. The results showed that all CEP deliverables had high creativity, followed by high usability. Finally, to confirm the validity of this educational program, we tracked and evaluated the careers of Japanese students (FY2019) who took this program. As a result, we found that more than half of the participants belonged to world-renowned companies with sales of over $1 billion.

Keywords:

Validation, Career Tracking, Multicultural and Multidisciplinary Environment, PBL, Engineering education.