فصلنامه آموزش مهندسی ایران
پیاپی 57 (بهار 1392)

Concurrent with the dawn of the 20th century and emergence of a new millennium, numerous countries revaluate their higher education and consequently engineering education. Similarly, international organizations, and in their forefront, UNESCO, along with national and international professional societies, put a vast effort on revaluation of higher education and proposing solutions for future. A great reform took place in engineering education to cope with the progress of modern world. These revaluations follow almost a similar pattern and intend to produce graduates that at least have the minimum required competencies recommended for an engineering graduate. Presently, revaluation of engineering programs has two centralized and decentralized forms. Centralized revaluation is done occasionally and usually focuses on major issues of engineering education, while the decentralized one is a continuous process done by educational institutions to upgrade the program through internal assessment. In the past few decades, all the aspects of planning and revaluation of engineering education programs of Iran were centralized. After almost one decade from the last revision of Iran’s engineering programs, their revaluation is underway. In this paper, after reviewing the strategies for revaluation of engineering programs in the world, some suggestions for revaluation of Iran’s engineering educational programs are presented.

The goal of this study is to identify core competencies in IT engineering education from the point of view of faculty members and employers. The used methodology is descriptive, and the statistical society consists of the faculty members of IT Department of Shiraz Industrial University and employers, who absorb the graduates in IT engineering. In respect to faculty members, the sampling method was as census and in respect to employers, it was a purposeful style. In collecting data, a questionnaire, employed by earlier theories and resources and based on various core dimensions (technical, behavioral and contextual), is used. The validity of the questionnaire is based on data analysis method, and it revealed valid scheme. Also, its reliability was based on Coronbach’s Coefficient Alpha gained 0.89. The review of questions is performed through Chi-square statistical test.

The purpose of this research was the analysis of prerequisites of applying blended learning system from perspective of Khuzestan province natural resources and agriculture faculty members. The statistical society of the study consists of 159 faculty members of the mentioned university, out of which 72 faculty members were selected as sample using simple random sampling and Cochran formula. A planned questionnaire was used as the main instrument to collect data. The content validity of the questionnaire was approved through getting opinions of specialists and experts in the field of Agricultural Extension and Education in the University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tehran. The reliability of the questionnaire was approved by Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient (α=0.91). SPSS17 software was used to analyze data. The finding indicated that the most important prerequisites of applying blended learning system from the faculty members’ view point were access on fast Internet and computer, enough band width net. The results of factor analysis showed that five factors of organizational, infrastructure, policy, professional and educational explained 71.751 percent of variance of prerequisites of applying blended learning system.

This study aimed to identify and assess the skills needed for better employment and participation of women in the industry. The study assessed competency models of training programs of Esfahan Mobarakeh Steel Company to revise the competencies required for employment of woman managers according to training program and competency models of these companies. This study also tried to list the most important and most basic skills and capabilities that women graduates of industrial sector need. This study is a survey and used questionnaires, documents and interview techniques. To collect data, all the directors of the study are selected. Participants in this study who filled in the questionnaires and took the interviews showed that they had the skills to work with computer, to wait on the clients, had the team work skills, as well as ICT skills, innovation and creative thinking ability in the environment, problem solving, reasonable job expectations, an understanding the objectives and policies, capability of training while working with managers of Esfahan Mobarakeh Steel Company. Among the skills mentioned, work with computer skills, client orientation and understanding the goals and policies of the organization are found to be more important. In addition, this study showed that it is required that women see training for working in adverse conditions.

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the effect of education on entrepreneurship intention and its determinants, including "attitude towards behavior", "subjective norms" and "perceived behavioral control" in Golpayegan University students that participate in the 72 hours entrepreneurship education workshop. Data has been collected by questionnaire in two phases, at the beginning and at the end of semester. The results pointed out the impact of entrepreneurship education on student's entrepreneurship intention, but not significant in determinants elements. Also, the impact of entrepreneurship education on industrial engineering students in comparison with other group of students was significant in variables "attitude towards behavior" and "subjective norms".

The learning environments and required capabilities of today’s graduate engineers are varying with the changing environment. Since it is important to coordinate the learning process with the external changes, engineering accreditation boards like ABET defines frameworks for engineering education worldwide. According to the revision of the evaluation criteria, it seems that the questionnaire’s contents are changing. The objective of this paper is to study how this will affect students/ instructors’ perception of learning process. In order to study the influence of adopting this new content on the evaluation results, two valid questionnaires (SEEQ and IDEA) were used according to their structure and development process and were distributed among six different Polymer Engineering classes of four instructors. At first total scores from two questionnaires were studied which showed different results, which could be due to the changes in students/instructor’s perception of learning process. Then the questionnaire that was based on student-centered environment which resulted in lower scores is discussed in details. It can be concluded that changing the questionnaire’s content according to new standards will change the students/instructors’ attitudes towards learning process.

E-learning systems are developing tremendously all over the world. More than one thousand institute have been accepted this method of teaching and learning parallel with their conventional system. In this rapid development phase, institute encountered with some problem of early attrition, withdraw, failure and dropout. So increasing e-learner success rate is one of the main and common concerns of all e-leaning centers. Although considering technological, infrastructural, content related, teacher and support system factors are undoubtedly very important in this regard, but it is believed that e-learner related factors has also a critical role. The goal of this study is developing and validation of a tools to predict e-learner's success rate. Instrument such as Online Distance Learner Survey (ODLS),Test of Online Learning Success(TOOLS), Tertiary Students’ Readiness for Online Learning(TSROL) were reviewed in the literature. To achieve the goal of the study, all item of the pre mentioned instrument were analyzed. Then a questioner is developed according to the literature and authors experience in IUST e-learning centre. In this step some subscales and items that are not important for e-learner success removed from scale. The initial scale is constructed with 67 items. In the next step 290 e-learners from IUST e-learning center have been selected randomly and asked to describe themselves in reference to a 5-point Likert-type scale, with anchors ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).Exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation where used to study constructs validity of the before mentioned tool. The result revealed that eleven-factor solution with Eignevalue over than one can count 62% variance of e-learner success construct. Iin this stage 24 items where excluded due to lack of factor load in any eleven-factors. Another intention of this study is to test reliability of the developed tool. The reliability of the questionnaire found satisfactory, with a Cronbach alpha of α=0.84 for the entire set of questioner.Although the developed questionnaire have construct validity and is reliable but the predictive validity has a crucial importance for authors so it is continued with using multiple regression with inter method. The average score of items that is related to each factor were calculated and enterd as a predictor into linear regression. The finding showed that eleven-factor can predict 14% valiance of e-learner GPA in our sample. Comparing this tool with others, it shows that it is reliable and has predictive validity that can be used for Iranian engineering education institute. Finally the paper conclude findings and present some recommendation to use this toll effectively.

The objective of this descriptive- survey research is to analyze inhibiting factors of software movement in agricultural and natural resources higher education. The statistical population of the study consisted of the graduate students of University College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tehran, out of which 124 people were selected as sample, using proportionate stratified sampling technique. Results of prioritizing showed that from all inhibiting factors of software movement in agriculture and natural resources higher education, the top three most important inhibiting factors (in order of importance) were “inappropriate use of academic research budget”, “not paying attention to practical and experiential education” and “not organizing and directing research attempts of academic researchers in order to solve the country's problems”. Also results of factor analysis revealed that six factors explained about 63.971 percent of variations of inhibiting factors of software movement in agricultural and natural resources higher education: infrastructural-input restrictions, informational and communicational problems, weakness in IT, obstacles in scientific exchange, institutional-management obstacles and motivation issues.