TOMSK, Dec 2 – RIA Tomsk. Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) opened the final session of the Synergy International Conference on engineering education on its online and offline venues on Thursday; it features experts from Russia, Europe and the US, RIA Tomsk correspondent reports from the opening ceremony.
The Synergy International Research-to-Practice Networking Conference has been held since 2016. In 2021, its events have already been held in Kazan, Tomsk, and Dresden (Germany), and the final session Regional Development: New Challenges for Engineering Education - Synergy-2021 on standards of training specialists for the oil and gas and chemical industry kicked off at TPU on December 2.
"Engineering education is a directed training. On the one hand, we prepare a student for the workplace, on the other hand, an engineer has to take into account a very wide range of issues. How to find the right balance and ratios between this "broad" education and narrowly focused professional training is a challenge for many of us now," Acting TPU Rector Dmitry Sednev said at the opening.
As Yury Pokholkov, President of the Association for Engineering Education of Russia and ex-rector of TPU, noted during the opening session, at present the current trends of engineers' training in Russia and abroad are contradictory. Thus, in his opinion, interdisciplinarity, promoted in all fields of education, will be effective in training engineers when there is success in training specialists in specific areas.
"We keep saying "quality of engineering education". The very notion of "quality" is the degree to which the needs of the product's customers are met. And they, the customers, are many. We are stepping on a path where we have to train everyone for everyone. It is a dead end, it seems to me. Rather, we should think of diversification of education and training of specialists for particular tasks," he said.
International participation
The session at TPU is also attended by Vice President of the European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education (ENAEE) José Carlos Quadrado, Director of the Institute of Additional Professional Education of Kazan National Research Technological University Mansur Galikhanov, Professor of Purdue University (USA) Phillip Sanger and others.
According to the TPU website, the session will take place online simultaneously in five areas covering current problems of interaction between engineering education and high-tech business and industry, the digital education environment, models of digital competencies and mechanisms for their independent attestation, and the training of highly qualified personnel for scientific, educational and business communities.
Experts will also discuss vocational education and trends in engineering education under conditions of digital transformation of society.
The conference is organized by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP), Association for Engineering Education of Russia (AEER), Kazan National Research
Technological University (KNRTU) and major international engineering education societies.
Transformation of engineering education is one of the key strategic stakes of Tomsk Polytechnic University laid down in the university development program for the next 10 years. With it, TPU has recently entered the Priority 2030 program of the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, in the first group of universities in the Research Leadership track.