Responsibility in biomedical engineering education: A comparative study of curriculum in India, Russia and the USA

Abstract

This article adds a comparative perspective to the ongoing debate on the ways of integrating the principle of responsibility into engineering education. While the need for increasing social and environmental awareness is expressed both by the professional and educational communities, the concrete measures for restructuring the curricula raise methodological, epistemological and pedagogical questions. The study links the normative debate to the state of the art in biomedical engineering curriculum in three different educational systems. The content analysis shows that in contrast to the commonly declared objective of formation of a responsible engineer, the range of disciplines and subjects that could contribute to its achievement is underrepresented in the undergraduate programs in terms of the workload. Despite the differences in the national standards, the level of institutionalization remains equally low.