Abstract:

The need to equip students with the competencies needed to appropriately and effectively communicate and work together with people from different backgrounds – in this paper referred to as ‘global competence’ – is certainly not a new one, but one which has attracted more and more attention in the wake of technological advances, labour market changes, and various globalizing processes.

Yet, for a long time, technical universities tended to turn a blind eye to the need for curriculum development, often tacitly hoping that international mobility would ‘take care’ of this weak link in study programmes heavily dominated by technical subjects. The fact that all but the most ambitious universities failed to include more than a fraction of its students in international mobility made this a flawed reasoning to start with, but by now this insight is also combined with a new awareness of how the coveted linguistic, communicative and cultural (LCC) competence development does not develop spontaneously by itself, in however culturally diverse surroundings, but need to be systematically supported, through curricula design, and by globally competent educators and staff.

To better understand the educational thinking and experiences of the stakeholders most crucially involved, a consortium with researchers from three European universities conducted a comparative study of perceptions and expectations using an internationally distributed survey carried out in 2022 (n=860), targeting educators (n=192), students (n=329), and alumni (n=339). In this paper, we focus on a comparison of students' and educators’ views on programme/curriculum content, resources, and opportunities relevant for developing global competence, and their perceived effectiveness. Apart from a critical look at the current state of affairs, we want to draw attention to perceptual discrepancies between the views of educators and students, highlighting the need for better integration of global competence education in engineering programmes. We will also explore internal differences within these two groups, based on geographical and disciplinary backgrounds.

Our project’s ultimate goal is to formulate well-grounded and practically applicable recommendations for integrated linguistic, communicative, and cultural training in support of optimized global competence education at engineering and technical universities, and we hope with this paper to provide not only an updated understanding of the educational landscape, but also some hands-on recommendations for educational change.

Keywords:

Global competence education, engineering education, educator-student comparison, linguistic, communicative and cultural competence, curriculum design.