Study
| The Context |
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Two decades ago, the U.S. National Research Council Panel on Continuing Education, in its report, Continuing Education of Engineers, recommended a collaborative effort between industry, university, and government to "establish the spectrum of values and objectives of continuing education for individual engineers, industry, and academia and to describe how continuing education could or should operate in the engineering world of tomorrow." While many continuing education programs are offered by professional societies and universities, a reexamination of the underlying assumptions is necessary due to the emergence of new technologies brought about by rapidly advancing fields such as bio, nano and info. The importance of lifelong learning for engineering professionals has been reiterated in the National Academies report, The Engineer of 2020. It calls for engineers to be lifelong learners because their career trajectories will take on many more directions due to rapidly changing technologies. The broader implication of lifelong learning to national competitiveness was considered in the 2006 Spellings Commission report (on the future of higher education) which calls for the "development of a national framework for lifelong learning designed to keep our citizens and our nation at the forefront of the knowledge revolution." It is within this context that we need to move to a new concept of learning discussed here. |