2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Currently, the new round of technological revolution and industrial change is developing deeply, and digital technology represented by artificial intelligence, big data, etc. is becoming more and more an important force to change the way of human production and life. In recent years, countries around the world have introduced relevant strategies to promote digital transformation in various fields, especially in the manufacturing sector. The digital transformation of the manufacturing industry not only puts forward new requirements for industrial development, but also puts forward brand-new challenges for the training of engineering talents, and engineering education must adapt to the needs of the digital development of the industry to cultivate talents with both professional skills and digital skills.

China attaches great importance to the digital transformation of education. In 2023, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China (MOE) implemented the "National Education Digitalization Strategy Action", and hosted the World Conference on Digital Education (WCDE) for two consecutive years in 2023 and 2024, which showed the world the latest progress of China's digital transformation of education and its plans. In the field of engineering education, China will start the pilot construction of the National Academy of Engineer Excellence in 2022, aiming to accelerate the cultivation of a large number of engineers of excellence to support the high-quality development of China's manufacturing industry and to strengthen the digital skills of engineering talents, which will become an important part of the cultivation of engineers in China in the present and the future. Many Chinese universities, especially those with a strong engineering focus, have launched pilots and explorations of digital transformation in engineering education.

We have conducted interviews or surveys of public information in Chinese universities, including Tsinghua University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Tianjin University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Tongji University, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Xi'an Electronic Technology University, China University of Petroleum (East China), and East China University of Science and Technology, and we have interviewed nearly 30 engineering faculty members, resulting in nearly 50,000 words of interview data. This paper will adopt the method of textual analysis to summarize the practice and reform of digital transformation of engineering education in Chinese universities based on the practices of these universities, identify the co-existing problems, and put forward several countermeasure suggestions.

From the viewpoint of existing practices, various universities have carried out explorations in the following aspects. In terms of curriculum, digital-related courses have been introduced into traditional courses, for example, the East China University of Science and Technology has introduced the elective module of "chemical + information". In terms of practical training, updating the original engineering training center has become an important initiative of each university, for example, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics has built a digital aircraft science and education collaborative platform, which provides an advanced platform for students to carry out engineering training based on industrial software. In the construction of faculty, attention is paid to the cultivation of teachers' digital skills, for example, China University of Petroleum (East China) has opened a short-term teaching class on digital skills for all teachers to help them master certain digital teaching skills. In terms of campus environment construction, all universities are actively building digital campuses and meta-universe campuses to provide a smarter digital campus environment for student learning, teacher teaching, and university management.

At the same time, it can also be found that there are still some urgent problems that need to be solved in the process of promoting the digitalization of engineering education in Chinese universities. The integration between digital courses and original professional courses is not high; teachers' digital skills are weak, making it difficult to carry out teaching that integrates professional knowledge and digital skills; the teaching of professional application scenarios of digital skills is insufficient, and students' learning of digital skills is still mainly in the stage of theoretical learning.

To this end, this paper intends to propose countermeasures from the following aspects. Strengthen the construction of teaching materials that integrate digital skills and professional knowledge, to provide a relatively standardized and cutting-edge knowledge system for students' learning and teachers' teaching; Strengthen the cultivation of interdisciplinary doctoral students, and take digital skills as the necessary skills for doctoral students of engineering, to equip them with the corresponding knowledge and ability before they become teachers; Provide students with an enterprise-like environment for the application of digital skills to solve the problems of their professional fields, and improve the level of digital skills during the training of the real scenarios training to improve digital skills.