Date: February 17, 2020
An inaugural Curriculum Development Workshop was held in the BUET Council Building on the 17th February 2020. Prof. Mohammad Shahjahan Mondal, Director, IWFM, BUET, initiated the session with a welcome address. A keynote speech was given by Prof. Mohammad Rezaur Rahman, IWFM, BUET on the “Advances in Community Participation and humanitarian engineering towards integrated flood management in Bangladesh”. Prof. Georgia Kremmyda from the University of Warwick, introduced everyone to ENHANCE with current status and progress. Prof. Saiful Islam, Hon’ble Vice Chancellor, BUET, was invited as the chief guest in this session. The inauguration session, as well as the workshop, have been arranged under the supervision of Prof. G M Tarekul Islam of IWFM, BUET.
Overview of the ENHANCE Project
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:
(a) mapping professional attributes for mitigating humanitarian challenges over the next 15 years;
(b) assessing and evaluating current graduate engineering programmes in Partner Institutions under the enablers needed to ensure humanitarian attributes to graduates;
(c) setting up tools for evaluating graduate engineering programmes;
(d) building capacity in the field of community-based engineering with interventions in curriculum content, assessment and feedback, methods of delivery;
(e) tasting, adopting and implementing in current curricula innovative (i.e. inclusive, interdisciplinary, problem-based) teaching and learning methodologies;
(f) 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 the 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.