A pilot study to incorporate collaboration and energy competency into an engineering ethics course

Abstract

According to the OECD, The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and other education policy experts all over the world, an urgent reform is needed to promote education innovation with “competencies” as the core. To investigate the feasibility to apply competency-oriented education, this pilot study surveyed the competencies of “collaboration” and “energy” and applied competency-oriented contents into an Engineering Ethics course in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The literature reveals that collaboration includes three constructs: trust, communication, and coordination. These constructs were used to develop a questionnaire and to survey the collaboration competency of the research subjects. In addition, an energy perception survey for Taiwan was used to compare and analyze the energy competencies between the research subject and the general adults in Taiwan. Finally, some suggestions are proposed for competency implementation in future courses.