The Sewol Ferry Disaster — an Engineering Education Problem | |
When I first arrived from Canada and joined the College of Engineering at Pusan National University in 2008 as a tenure-track faculty member, I recall one of my colleagues at the time mentioning that I was quite courageous to have come here. I thought perhaps he was referring to a lower standard of living I would encounter in Korea or perhaps to difficulties I would face in teaching in English to Korean students who may not be fully fluent in that language. It’s only several months later that I realized what my colleague meant: there is an educational problem in Korea and the educational quality is lagging considerably compared to other industrialized states. By teaching the students shallow courses that require little effort and preparation to pass, the professors are not only preventing the engineering students to reach their full potential but are also encouraging them to develop bad habits (poor attention to details, poor self-organization, poor capabilities in solving challenging problems, etc) that many keep for the rest of their careers. This may explain the need of Korean engineers to acquire technology from abroad instead of developing their own even in flagship national projects such as the Naro rocket (Russian technology) or the KTX train (French technology). This may also be the root cause for the recent engineering-related disasters such as the Sewol ferry capsizing or the Gyeongju auditorium collapsing. |
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Why don't professors in Korea teach at the same level as in other industrialized nations then? I find the biggest hurdle that the professors are here facing is the too high number of courses they are required to teach. At PNU as well as in most universities in Korea, engineering professors are required to teach 9 hours of lectures per week during the semester and, often, to teach one course during the winter and summer breaks. In Canada, the United States, and the European Union, the engineering professors are required to teach at the most 6 hours per week during the semester, and none during the vacation (which is normally spent doing research or improving the course material for the following semester). To improve the education of the Korean engineers, I would recommend the Ministry of Education to make the following changes to the regulations: (i) no engineering professor should be allowed to teach more than 6 hours per week, as anything more leads to shallow courses that are detrimental to the development of the engineering students; and (ii) incentives should be implemented to encourage the engineering professors to raise the rhythm and cover as much material as their counterparts abroad. Perhaps the best way that the latter could be achieved is through external reviews of the courses performed by faculty members from foreign universities with a strong reputation for tertiary educational quality. This article appeared in the Korea Herald on June 23rd, 2014 [l]. |
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