Implementing Co-operative Education in an Industrial Engineering Program in the United Arab Emirates: Experience and Lessons Learned

摘要

This research presents the co-operative (co-op) education experience in an Industrial Engineering and Management program in the University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and its role in achieving the students' learning outcomes. Previous researchers found that students who choose a co-operative education achieve higher Grade Point Average (GPA) and emphasized the role of a student's professional experience in meeting the non-technical engineering skills criteria of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). In this research, an effort is made to show the degree of achievement of both technical and non-technical skills expected from the program's graduates. The graduates' data are analyzed using descriptive statistics. We show the differences between the genders' choice of co-op or Senior Design Project (SDP) option as well as their Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) and the achievement of ABET criteria. The results show that more than 50% of the students choose the co-op over the SDP option and this number has been increasing over the last few years. Knowing that UAE society is composed mostly of expatriates of many different nationalities, we have analyzed the choice of students based on their nationalities and found that the co-op is the favorite choice for Emirati students with an over whelming female majority (92%), while Expatriate students favored the SDP option. Our results confirm other findings in the literature in terms of CGPA and achievement of learning outcomes. For example, the CGPA was higher for students who choose the co-op (2.95 out of 4) than for the SDP students (2.70 out of 4). The students' achievement of the ABET criteria was almost 9% higher for co-op students compared with that for SDP students. Based on these results, we are recommending the implementation of co-operative education in other engineering programs in the University of Sharjah.