Abstract:

Trends and perspectives on improving engineering education point towards two major issues: curriculum integration, and multidisciplinary studies. While most curricula development is evolutionary in nature, in certain circumstances it is more fruitful to take a revolutionary approach in improving and developing a curriculum. This paper presents the re-design and development of an industrial and systems engineering curriculum at Qatar University through a reverse engineering concept. In applying the reverse engineering concept, the technological principles of the existing industrial and systems engineering curriculum are analyzed by assessing the structure, functional and operational objectives of the curriculum components. This is done in order to extract design and implementation information. End products of the industrial and systems engineering program are used deduce curriculum design decisions in order to replace incorrect, incomplete, or unavailable curriculum components. The chosen components are implemented in a dynamic and reconfigurable manner in which the existing students are given the opportunity of selecting curriculum components related to their specialization option. The results of implementing the new components in the curriculum are discussed together with the impact of the new structure on the curriculum.

Keywords:

engineering education, curriculum design, reverse engineering, systems engineering.