Preparing Students for Impactful Careers in Industry
In this session, hear about the challenges that deans and department heads face as they evolve their curricula to meet the ever-changing needs of industry and students. See how MathWorks aligns as a university partner by developing teaching tools and resources that help prepare students to fit industry and research workflows. This talk integrates MathWorks resources such as assignment autograding, online training courses, courseware, integrations with open source software (OSS), student programs, and capstone projects in a conversation about enabling educators to teach complex engineering concepts in an effective and engaging manner.
Published: 7 May 2023
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Hello, everyone. And Thank you for joining this session on preparing students for impactful careers in industry. My name is Moiz Kahn. And I manage the electrical and computer engineering discipline.
Like many of you, I've spent numerous years in academia and have served as a consultant to industry leaders in robotics and automation. In this time, I have developed a strong understanding of what it takes to have a successful engineering career and how we can bring these attributes back to better prepare students for their academic journey.
Now as a side note, when sharing on social media, please use #MATLABEXPO. We'll be following your tags and sharing content throughout the event. You can also follow me on LinkedIn where I post new content and demos on a regular basis. The handle's on the bottom left.
Now for the fun part. This is about you. As engineering educators, you're faced with many considerations at any given time. You've got student needs on one side and the dean's expectations on another. It can be a juggling act to meet these demands while continuing to adapt and innovate. We are taking these issues and categorize them by four important stakeholders in the engineering education ecosystem. There are various needs and expectations that need to be addressed in the context of achieving academic excellence.
The university leadership is interested in position of university at the top of the research and teaching world while faculty want to ensure adequate funding for their research. On the other hand, students want to ensure that they're best prepared for all the job opportunities upon graduation. And likewise, industry wants to ensure that the new workforce coming to the market is ready to hit the ground running.
We see successful universities address these expectations by focusing on three primary aspects, curricula, collaboration, and digitalization. Now let's spend some time walking through each one of these and we'll start with curriculum development. Most complex engineering systems are multi-domain and therefore multidisciplinary education is extremely important for preparing students. Now whether we're talking about robotic systems, vehicles, or everyday devices, the engineering required at a systems level needs to be considered when incorporating these aspects throughout the different disciplines.
Let's take wind turbines as an example. Mechanical engineers might be concerned with the physical systems and its controls while electrical engineers are interested in the circuitry and the power transmission. Similarly, computer engineers might be thinking about the algorithms for fault detection. And when we think about it from all the other areas as well, airspace might be considering the blade design. Civil engineers are thinking about road access to transport these massive structures to their end locations, chemical engineer is thinking about how to build batteries for energy storage, and environmental engineers thinking about the bird habitat that is being affected by the development of these large structures. These complex systems require a true multidisciplinary approach for them to be successful.
On top of the multidisciplinary education, there are all these rapidly evolving trends such as robotics, AI, electrifications. And these are difficult to incorporate into a curriculum. They might just be topics that students are interested in on top of already taught foundational courses that they are taking. And we are happy to help you achieve this and help you incorporate this into your curriculum.
For example, we have several supplementary courses on top of what you are already offering to your students. These range from deep learning to power electronics and include foundational programming topics to image processing and object-oriented programming.
Now what about the professional skills? These are important, too. Critical thinking and project management are crucial for success when it comes to working with cross-functional multidisciplinary teams, which is an essential part of any job.
Now here's an example of a course we supported at the University of West of England. It was an avionics controls lab. Our engineers supported this by incorporating the minidrone competition into the lab, which allowed the inclusion of additional collaborative, team-based education in addition to the development and deployment of image processing algorithms.
Now let's take a look at collaboration. This is generally seen as two different types. One is interdepartment collaboration. And then there is academic and industry collaboration. We'll start with interdepartment collaboration. In a multidisciplinary education, it is required to have this strong interdepartment collaboration.
Students come in to a program. They learn concepts. Then they learn about how to apply some of that theory through their work problems. And then eventually they go on to thinking about how to work on real problems through project-based learning. Finally, students will really benefit from working in cross-functional teams as they go through the different concepts to the final multi-domain systems.
Let's use robotics as an example to walk through this. If a student wants to learn robotics, they may join the mechanical engineer department to learn, let's say, robot kinematics. Then they may go on to taking a controls course so they can build their foundational understanding of how to build, let's say, closed loop models, which can be part of both the mechanical or electrical engineering department.
And as they get further into their education, they'll start thinking about how to develop smart algorithms which can control these physical systems, which can be taught both in the engineering system as well as computer science. Finally, they're in their fourth year and now they want to specialize and think about different applications. They could really take courses that are found in any variety of departments throughout the engineering system.
Now we have instructor-led training content that is for practicing and engineers that does exactly this. This is what we do. And this is what we can offer. We are learning things from our industry partners. And we're bringing that back to our educators. One way that we do this is through our excellence and innovation program or the students project program. These projects are industry inspired and range from warehouse robotics to electrical charging systems.
One example is the UAV infrastructure inspection project that a group of students worked on using deep learning. Students built complete control systems using state flow. Then they trained AI models using YOLO in a MATLAB Simulink environment. And then finally, they connected the platform to Unreal Engine for photorealistic simulation.
Now we also facilitate direct collaboration between industry and academia, which is developing courses that are more career focused. In this example, MathWorks partnered with Bosch and the National Institute of Technology Calicut to develop an EV course. Given that we were working with industry experts, this course is highly industry focused. Similarly, we supported Chalmers University in Sweden with their industry collaboration towards a MOOC series on emerging automotive technologies. These courses are part of a MicroMasters Program and hosted on EdX.
So why MATLAB and Simulink? It is used at 100,000 businesses, government, and university sites worldwide. It is used by the top 10 automotive, aerospace companies, and also several hardware internet companies as well. Here you can see actual job postings by leading companies in the automotive, manufacturing, and hardware industries. Jobs range from design simulation, modeling and development, and both require foundational MATLAB and Simulink experience.
We also have two examples of students that have given us great feedback on how their education helped them kick off their engineering careers. They were using MATLAB and Simulink that they applied through student competitions that they worked on. And then they were able to translate what they learned into their actual careers.
They reflected on how important MATLAB and Simulink was towards their career development. And two of the examples-- one was from Joe Martin from the University of Michigan, who said by working on highly complex systems, he was able to understand the right skills that were required for working the real field. Another one from Jessica Britt from the Georgia Institute of Technology where, by taking part in the EcoCAR competition that MathWorks also sponsors, she was able to understand how to work on real controls problems.
Now for digitalization. Digitalization in engineering education can be understood in terms of building digital skills and students and using digital tools for teaching and learning. From a skills perspective, this means diving into the digital future through AI, CAD, modeling, simulation.
And digital tools are also going beyond the standard shock and talk as it was done in the past. You can see in the 1990s PowerPoint became a big thing where we're using image-based slides to give student feedback and teach them different concepts. Then in 2000 moving to mobile web apps that are very interactive and LMS systems that allow grading, and feedback, and management of overall student activity. And now the future is moving towards these AI-based language models such as ChatGPT.
MathWorks provides solutions that helps businesses adopt these digital trends. They range from automated driving to electrification and robotics, as you can see highlighted right here. We also help educators bring these trends to their courses. One way that we do that is through courseware that is developed by in-house engineers and former educators.
Now let's shift gears and see how digital tools bring improvements to teaching and learning. These tools increase accessibility by ensuring access to learning software from any place in any time. They help increase student engagement by providing interactive immersive learning experiences through simulation and visualization along with self-paced online courses and even individualized feedback.
They're also more cost effective and easy to scale as we move away from physical systems into more virtual lab settings that can span and support larger classrooms or those without physical access to hardware. And students can also work in collaborative environments where they can share real world experience, their ideas, and receive feedback from their peers and instructors.
So we mentioned we helped bring digitalization to curriculum. And this is one great example where we did such. Arizona State University wanted to expose students to AI and IoT right out of the gate. As a result, they reported that students felt more motivated and excited about the topics.
And when students really get exposed to topics earlier on in their education, they become more and more motivated and do more exciting and challenging things through later parts of their education into their careers. One great example is a student group in ETH Zurich who worked together to develop a jumping robot for their final project. Now these students put together 20 designs that they optimized using MATLAB and Simulink. And then they picked one and built a 3D model of this system and, finally, an actual working prototype for their final year projects.
Now let's go back to the digital classroom for a second. MATLAB provides many possibilities to this end. MATLAB Online provides access to your MATLAB software right to the web browser and as well as to your tablet or phone. The virtual labs allow the use of actual physical replicas through our software platform where students can engage and get feedback from the comfort of their own homes. And the MATLAB live script allows students to integrate their algorithms and get feedback on the performance in real time.
Now we also have the MATLAB online courses that we shared a minute ago along with MATLAB Grader, which allows grading of software directly through our platform and giving students immediate feedback and automatic grading right into the LMS systems. And finally, project-based learning where students can use low cost hardware such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi's to collaborate and solve real world problems.
A great example of this is out of HTW Dresden where they converted a physical lab into a virtual lab. Now this allows students to learn about topics such as signal generators, oscilloscopes, and filtering methods, both in the virtual and the physical environment. Now the virtual environment was specifically and especially important during COVID when access to these labs was physically and nearly impossible.
And I had really briefly mentioned MATLAB Grader. Now that's another tool for teaching and grading. This allows students to receive that instant feedback on their homework problem while the grade is automatically entered into LMS system of the choice, minimizing grading time for both the faculty and the teaching assistant.
Now let's bring all of this together. So what does this mean for the questions of our engineering educator? That MathWorks is a partner in these challenges, whether it is to support towards curriculum development, using our knowledge on project-based learning, or our commitment to helping researchers integrate things like AI, using industry standard tools. We can work together to improve teaching strategies to better position students for impactful careers. So reach out to us and let's get this collaboration started. With that, thank you for joining me today. And I look forward to connecting with you afterwards.
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