ANALYZING THE NECESSITY OF PROVIDING COMPLEMENTARY COURSES OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES TO ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS

This study probed into the opinions of teachers and electrical engineers (working at electric industry) on the importance of providing some courses of law, administration, communications and accounting for electrical engineering students. This applied study fell into the category of descriptive/survey research. Statistical population consisted of all teachers of Electrical Engineering Faculty at Shiraz University and all electrical engineers of Fars Regional Electric Company. Sixty-nine engineers are selected as a sample while all teachers (16 teachers) answered the questions. To collect the data, a questionnaire is designed and distributed. Questionnaire validity is tested by face/content approach while its reliability is confirmed by Cronbach's alpha and split-half methods. To analyze the data, some methods including Kolmogorov/Smirnov, binomial, t-test and Friedman are performed. Findings showed that from the viewpoint of teachers, accounting, correspondence courses are of moderate importance, and other courses including technical reporting, law, employer relations, management, intellectual property, environment and energy are very important. Despite this fact, electrical engineers believed that legal and accounting courses are less important than other courses. Furthermore, teachers opposite to electrical engineers, put the legal and intellectual property courses in a higher level of importance.