During March 8, 9 and 10, 2021 in Valencia, Spain, preliminary results of the TA VIE project were presented at the 15th International Technology, Education and Development Conference (INTED). INTED is one of the largest international education conferences for lecturers, researchers, technologists, and professionals from the educational sector. After 15 years, it has become a reference event where more than 700 experts from 80 countries will get together to present their projects and share their knowledge on teaching and learning methodologies and innovations on educational technology.

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Paper presented:

SCENARIOS BASED APPROACH TO ASSESS GLOBAL COMPETENCE IN ENGINEERING MOBILITY PROGRAMS
I. Ortiz-Marcos¹, L.I. Ballesteros-Sánchez¹, V. Breuker², A. Hernández Bayo¹, R. Rodríguez-Rivero^1
1Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (SPAIN)
²Universitá di Milán (ITALY)  

Abstract:

The global world requires an essential emphasis on sustainability regarding productivity and industrialization processes, all the more with current environmental issues—water supply, deforestation, climate change—as well as sanitary issues like COVID-19, which permeate throughout and threaten all global activity. The development of the TA VIE project presented here stemmed from an international collaboration of five European HEI institutions in Spain, Italy, France, Sweden and Hungry. The TA VIE project has shown that companies understand the relevance of global competencies and young professionals should improve in those competencies. Companies in the five national contexts participating in the project argue that engineers should deploy these competencies to follow market trajectories and face current challenges. As a result of the first intellectual output of the project a framework of global competencies for engineers was published. Now, in this second part of the project, we are ready to share how to measure these competencies with engineering students using an innovative approach. In this paper the result of scenarios designed to measure global competencies is presented.  

Keywords: Global competence, Competence Assessment, Scenario approach, International experience, Engineering.

News: we want to share with the entire TA VIE community that a research article (open access) has recently been published within the framework of the development of the project, with the aim of disseminating the preliminary results of the project as well as the most outstanding findings of the early stages.

We hope this research article is of interest to you!

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Abstract

This paper presents the results of the first part of the Tools for Enhancing and Assessing the Value of International Experience for Engineers (TA VIE) project, launched in 2018, and outlines a contemporary understanding of global competence for engineers, as understood by European engineering companies. Striving to make engineering education more comprehensively aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and thereby meeting demands from industry and society, the notion of “global competence” has attracted more and more attention from engineering schools. While there is no universally agreed on definition of global competence, the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) definition, which explicitly combines global awareness and intercultural communication competence with sustainability efforts, seems potentially well positioned to inform higher education institutions’ (HEI) global competence education. This is perhaps especially so when it comes to international student mobility, an area which is regularly seen as an important means to enhance global competence while all too often being assessed not in terms of qualitative student development, but in terms of structural indicators. However, in order to assess and improve curricula and mobility programs, the desired learning outcomes must first be specified. Based on research in five European countries (Spain, Italy, Sweden, France and Hungary), this paper details the understanding, requirements and perceived skill gaps of companies hiring engineering graduates, a first step towards improved and assessable global competence education for engineering students.

Keywords: global competence; internationalization; engineering profession; qualitative research; European comparison

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Sustainability 2020, 12(22), 9568; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229568

Download PDF: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/22/9568/pdf