One-day Education Engineering Forum 2015

KENET through its Special Interest Groups (SIGs) successfully organized a One-day Education Engineering Forum. The main aim of the forum was to launch of the Baseline Survey of Engineering Departments and to disseminate the results of the Raspberry PI Student-Owned Labs for Engineering Education project. The forum was hosted at the Safari Park Hotel on 30thOctober 2015.

The forum brought together over 76 participants from 36 engineering departments of 18 KENET member institutions. These included deans and faculty members of engineering departments in Kenyan Universities.

At the forum, reports on the baseline line survey and raspberry pi were shared with the participants. The engineering departments’ baseline survey was part of a broader Engineering and ICT department’s survey conducted from November 2014 to March 2015. Among other highlights noted during the forum on the baseline survey, the participants noted the lecturer to student ratio, low budgets assigned to engineering departments, and poor Masters and PhD uptake, commercialization of research through publications not evident and lack of data from the universities to generate accurate baseline surveys. In addition four university teams (Dedan Kimathi University of Technology, Meru University of Science and Technology, United States International University and University of Nairobi) that were awarded a mini grant of $10,000 for the Raspberry PI student-owned labs presented a summary of major achievements and the lessons learnt from the project. Such as the fast students’ uptake of the Raspberry Pi application and enhancement of teaching and demonstration of engineering concepts using Raspberry Pi applications.

Dr. Alice Njuguna a member of KENET SIG encouraged participants to implement blended learning approaches in engineering courses such as the use of the TriLabs concept through which students are exposed to virtual, hands-on and remote laboratory. She pointed out that demand for implementing blended learning approaches were on the rise and the engineering departments should thus go with the tide.