2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering education in developed countries is seen as a benchmark for all others. Its teaching strategies, combined with the way of assessing knowledge and the infrastructure of modern laboratories and classrooms, allow students to develop their skills and prepare themselves professionally for the job market. At the same time, engineering education is not valued in Brazil. Its teaching methodologies are traditional and directed towards a final concept. With this, a series of essential and necessary skills for the job market are partially developed, such as teamwork, problem solving and critical thinking. Thus, as strategies similar to those that companies do, a benchmarking to understand how this process takes place. This benchmarking is essential for directing engineering education based on best practices already adopted by other universities. In this context, the present study aims to investigate the possibility of inserting North American teaching strategies in Brazilian universities, under the focus of engineering. As methodological procedures, unstructured interviews were used in a focus group with five different American universities. In these groups, professionals who are related to engineering education were invited: teachers, members of teaching and learning centers and administrative support and support technicians. In addition to the interviews, direct observations about the infrastructure and the procedures adopted in their teaching were carried out in order to analyze their complexity. As a result, we highlight the development of strategic partnerships with local industries in which alumni are the main means of engaging these partnerships, the development of a unique competency management that involves the entire university and the need for innovation in the education environment in engineering so that the university can be increasingly inserted in the context of open innovation with a focus on attracting new students, economic and geographic growth and local social
impact with a focus on community development.