A four day long “Curriculum Development workshop in Bangladesh, Erasmus and a project titled ENHANCE (Enabling Humanitarian Attributes for Nurturing Community based Engineering)” ends today at council Building of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Institute of Water and Flood Management (IWFM) of BUET organised the workshop.
The session was chaired by University of Warwick Professor Toby Mottram where BUET Vice-Chancellor Professor Dr Saiful Islam was present as chief guest. IWFM Professor Dr Md Rezaur Rahman presented the keynote speech. IWFM Director and Professor Dr Mohammad Shahjahan Mondal, delivered welcome address. Professor Dr Tarekul Islam coordinated the programme.
Engineering has a pivotal role to play in solving humanitarian challenges, enabling communities to progress towards sustainable development. Because the issues of humanitarianism are not just engineering problems, there is need to introduce new designs of engineering education to embrace and exploit combinational expertise in community-based engineering. ENHANCE aims at nurturing humanitarian attributes through engineering education for serving unsupported communities effectively and responsibly, in identifying problems and defining sustainable solutions. The novelty of ENHANCE lies in integrating highly diverse, yet complementary, expertise in engineering Higher Education (HE).
The objectives of the project involve mapping professional attributes for mitigating humanitarian challenges over the next 15 years; assessing and evaluating current graduate engineering programmes in Partner Institutions under the enablers needed to ensure humanitarian attributes to graduates; setting up tools for evaluating graduate engineering programmes; building capacity in the field of community-based engineering with interventions in curriculum content, assessment and feedback, methods of delivery; tasting, adopting and implementing in current curricula innovative (i.e. inclusive, interdisciplinary, problem-based) teaching and learning methodologies and developing and testing a ‘Teaching Training seminar kit’ for educators in HE. The outputs of the project will be disseminated to audiences from HE educators and students in the partner countries; modern media (podcasts, video’s, etc.) will be utilised to share insights with a wide audience. ENHANCE will allow us to ensure advancement of community-based engineering directly to a range of Official Development Assistance (ODA) recipients and to instigate longer-term developments with beneficiaries and end users.
Among others, DU Professor Mohammad Shoeb, University of Warwick Professor Georgia Kremmydia and IWFM Professor Dr Sujit Kumar Bala were also present at the workshop.
