QUALITY ISSUES IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION IN NIGERIA Prof. S.A. Balogun & Dr. D.E. Esezobor Dept.of Metallurgical and Materials Engineering University of Lagos ABSTRACT This paper discusses the factors affecting the quality of engineering education at the tertiary level and suggest ways by which the decline in qualily may be stemmed. It is proposed that Further Mathematics and Technical Drawing be added to the registration requirements for engineering programmes and that a one-year industrial training scheme be introduced after the fourth year of the degree programme. INTRODUCTION The problems of engineering education in Nigeria Universities and Polytechnics have been articulated by many stakeholders. (1-4), The problems include the dearth. of suitable teaching and technical personnel, low funding levels, inadequacy of infrastructural facilities, poor remuneration and low staff morale. It is widely held in institutions of higher learning. that if appropriate level of funding is established and maintained, many of the other problems will cease to exist. The relatively unattractive remuneration package in the universities has been the main impediment to staff sufficiency in the institutions. Highly qualified personnel would rather go to the oil and financial sectors where acceptable rates of pay are maintained. Thus, the few that drift to the universities hold the jobs as stop-gaps while the search for a more rewarding employment is continued. This breeds very high staff turn-over and an attendant decline in the quality of instruction. Teaching and research efforts are frustrated by the obsoleteness of laboratory and workshop equipment, paucity and lack of currency of books, journals and periodicals and a flawed admission process which often does not properly reward merit. To compound the problem, the interaction of students with industry, which is designed to add value to the practical training of the products of engineering degree programmes, has considerably reduced because of dearth of placement slots in an industry that has been struggling to survive in the face of low capacity utilization. This paper takes a look at some of the significant factors that affect the quality of engineering education at the tertiary level and suggests ways by which the decline in the quality of engineering education may be stemmedFactors in Engineering Education Professor John J. Sparkes (5) of the Open University has identified the following factors as those that can affect the quality of engineering education: (a) _ the importance of specifying clear educational goals (b) matching the educational methods used to the specified goals (c) matching the assessment methods adopted to these goals (d) the balance between “content” and "process" in the educational programmes offered (ec) _ the problems of overloading the curriculum (the use of information technology in the educational process, and (g) the application of modern methods of quality assurance in university education The importance of these factors in determining the quality of engineering education is obvious in some cases and not quite so in others. Engineering education can not be imparted for its own sake. It has to have clearly defined goals, Whereas goals are clearly defined in Nigerian polytechnic and senior Secondary education, the same does not appear to be true of graduate engineering education where objectives are clearly specified and course contents have not changed appreciably in two decades in spite of extensive developments in the profession. The following science and technology policy objectives (6) are probably the closest to an engineering education policy. (a) increasing public awareness in science and technology and their vital role in national development and well-being; (b) directing science and technology efforts along identified national goals; (©) promoting the translation of Science and Technology results into actual goods and services; (d) creating, increasing and maintaining an indigenous science and Technology base through research and development; (ce) motivating creative output in Science and Technology; () increasing and strengthening theoretical and practical scientific base in the society and () _ increasing and strengthening the technological base of the nation. In Indonesia, the training of engineering students is designed to achieve the following important goals: (a) the inculcation of leadership qualities (b) maintenance of high moral values (0) development of students’ interest in culture and national heritage (d) production of graduates with strong business and entrepreneurship skills. These objectives have been pursued with relentless vigour and the outcome has been truly rewarding, Through the efforts of her engineers and technologists, Indonesia has done enough in manufacture and entrepreneurship to be dubbed an Asian tiger - a euphemism 34for fast emerging Asian economies. This has earned the nation respect in the comity of nations and translated into better living standards for her citizens. Admission _ Admission processing plays a major role in determining the quality of engineering students as well as the quality of the engineers eventually produced. Admission into Nigerian engineering, faculties may be gained through the joint matriculation examination process or the direct entry route. In both cases, the candidate needs a minimum of five credit passes at two sittings of the GCE ordinary level to qualify for registration. Unfortunately, secondary education standards have fallen so badly over the years that many school certificate holders cannot speak three correct English sentences or pass five O/level subjects at a sitting. ‘Acceptance of five subjects at two sittings thus provides an avenue for poor students to gain admission into the engineering programmes. The requirements for the direct entry admission are even less stringent - two A/level passes at two sittings without the prescription of a maximum time lag between the first pass and the second. Thus a candidate can pass two such subjects after four or five yearly attempts to get admitted. This type of student is naturally weak and will not be able to cope with the intellectual requirements of the programme. To make progress in the course, be may resort to sharp practices and other forms of examination malpractices. The matriculation examination is, itself, not free of blemish. It is widely believed that most of the results published by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board JAMB) do not represent the actual performance of the candidates. Students whose continuous assessments through school and the senior secondary examination results have shown to be poor students often score ridiculously high marks and are offered admission at the expense of good students with moderate JAMB scores and excellent school certificate results. This informed the recent resolution at the National Summit on Education that admission to universities should no longer be based solely on the JAMB scores but that universities should be free to apply other assessment criteria to make their selection. Registration Requirements The current requirements for registration in engineering degree programmes in Nigeria are credit passes in English Language, Physics, Chemistry and Elementary or General Mathematics, Further Mathematics and Technical Drawing are not compulsory. Students with good grasp of both General and Further Mathematics have a much greater capacity to benefit from the engineering degree courses. Also, a good background in Technical Drawing at secondary school level is known to aid the rate of assimilation of Engineering Drawing in the university. It would appear therefore, desirable to make these subjects further requirements for registration in engineering programmes. The result (7) of an effort to improve quality of academic programmes in Tamkang University in Taiwan by the application of Total Quality Management (TQM) is quite instructive here. The experiment was performed when a proliferation of students intake diminished the quality of the university academic programmes. The components of the TOM program implemented in the university included.(a) _ office automation and computerization of library operation (b) installation of across-campus computer network (©) enhanced instructional evaluation system. (@) faculty reward system offering rewards for outstanding teaching and academic research, and (e) departmental evaluation based on the faculty's quality and research publications Students performances improved significantly with the TQM programme. — For engineering students, however, the TQM programme tolally failed to improve the performance of students who were admitted with poor background in mathematics and the physical sciences. This clearly underscores the need for engineering students to be proficient in these subjects if they must perform. Curriculum Focus ‘Two views have been canvassed about the appropriate curricula and instructional methods for engineering education. One view is that institutions of higher learning should design programmes which will produce personnel that will perfectly suit the diverse and rapidly changing needs of industry. The other (5) reckons that rather than attempt to meet specific needs, engineering personnel must be trained to be versatile enough to readily accept the changing needs of industry and adapt to it, New instructional techniques are also advocated. In Africa, particularly in the less industrialized parts, production facilities are small or medium sized and manufacturing techniques are still largely conventional. Therefore, the changes in engineering training methods which widespread application of emerging technologies (e.g. robotics, information technology, flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) may demand may be considered less urgent. In the circumstance, the focus should be to produce versatile engineers who can readily adapt to changes whenever they occur in the future. According: to Solomon Buchsbaum (8) such versatile engineers will be readily produced if the following needs are addressed by engineering education: (a) the need for flexibility to learn for tomorrow, in addition to specific job skill of today (b) _ theneed to embrace the gamut of engineering jobs in additional R&D. (©) __ the need fora global perspective in all aspects of engineering, education (a) _ the need to understand how engineering is practiced, along with common generic approaches to tasks (e) _ the need to understand the societal impacts of 5 able to help in countering their negative impacts. ience and engineering and to be Academic programme The current 5-year engineering programme in Nigerian Universities allows for the teaching of general science courses in the first year as well as basic courses in mechanics, fluids, thermodynamics, applied electricity etc in the second year for all engineering students. The third, fourth and fifth years are for specialization in specific disciplines. In these years, 36students also participate in supervised industrial work experience schemes (SIWES) for ' three months in each of the second and third years and six months in the fourth year. Employers of the products of these programmes, however, often complain that the graduates require some further practical engineering training to be suitable for direct employment in their engineering activities. Given the current emphasis on direct class teaching in engineering programmes and the dearth of placement spaces for industrial work experience, these complaints cannot be entirely baseless. It should, therefore, be squarely addressed if the needs of the ultimate users of our products must be met. Algeria has solved (9) the problem of insufficient industrial training of engineering graduates by mounting training programmes in every year of the students’ 5-year degree programme. Students’ supervision and subsequent evaluation/ grading of reports are jointly done by senior industry staff and senior staff members of the faculty. The final year independent study projects are executed in much the same way. Staff of the manufacturing concerns suggest the topics which are usually designed to solve specific factory problems or design/manulacture products and carry out detailed repairs of damaged equipment. Supervision is jointly implemented by facully and factory staff and final project assessment is done jointly. Masters and doctoral degree projects are carried out in much the same fashion. It seems to me that the problem can be solved by drastically reviewing the curricula of the various engineering programmes to allow for more practical/industrial content. Currently, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find places for industrial work experience for our students because most industries see the deployment of students for industrial work experience for three or six months as a costly distraction. They would rather have the students for one full year. This time is considered long, enough for the trainees to acquire sufficient expertise and be useful to the companies before leaving. This is why manufacturing companies accept diplomates of polytechnics more readily for one-year industrial training and reject university students. Tt may be necessary for universities to re-structure engineering programmes to allow for a one-year industrial training after the fourth year of the programme instead of the current six months. The students will return to the university, after the one-year industrial attachment, to complete the course as is currently the case in National Diploma programmes. This arrangement will be similar to the year abroad French language students of the University of Lagos used to spend in France to achieve competence in oral/spoken French. An advantage of this proposed arrangement is that more time will be available for both core and general courses and the current overloading, of the curriculum which allows little room for proper course assimilation will be eliminated. Curriculum Review To ensure continued relevance, engineering curricula ought to be reviewed from time to time. In the US, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) and various discipline societies like the American Society of Civil Engineer's (ASCE) the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) etc and academic research groups hold major (10) conferences to discuss curriculum and course orientations These bodies critically 37appraise the existing curricula vis-a-vis developments in the engineering industry and prescribe new direction for the programmes. In Nigeria, no body plays this important role on regular basis. The closest to this has been the conference organized jointly by the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) and the Committee of Deans of Engineering and Technology of Nigerian Universities (CODET) in 1991 to discuss the future of engineering education in Nigeria. The National Universities Commission (NUC) and COREN carry out periodic accreditation inspections to ascertain that engineering programmes comply wilh some prescribed minimum standards. Unfortunately these are mere quality control measures. Industry is not involved and curriculum or course orientation is not prescribed. It is important that COREN, NSE, NUC, the Universities and industry should discuss the issues deeply and make appropriate recommendations to universities on curriculum and course orientation. For instance, the widespread application of micro-electronics based technologies on production, manufacture and general business should compel a revision of various engineering programmes to allow for their appreciation and assimilation by the resulting graduate engineers. This is the more so because the undergraduate level is the level at which the introduction of the technologies would be most appropriate if a more widespread diffusion is to be achieved. Teaching and Laboratory Facilities The dearth of teaching, and laboratory and workshop facilities in most Nigerian Engineering degree programmes will inevitably contribute to the diminution of the quality of the engineering graduates. Students have been classified (10) into three distinct catego “visualizers" and “doers”. Verbalizers are those who learn more easily if information is in written or spoken form. These benefit a lot from lectures, tutorials and hand-outs. Visualisers are those who learn more easily when information is presented in pictorial or diagrammatic form. These benefit more from maps, drawings, film projection, videotape etc. Doers learn more easily when information is presented in form of practical activities. The idea is presented by practical demonstration by the teacher and the doer gets a quick grasps of the concept. From these definitions, it is clear that verbalisers among, Nigerian engineering, students have the best prospect of good performance on the programme. The inadequacies in teaching, laboratory and workshop facilities pul the visualisers and doers at a great disadvantage. Even the verbalisers have problems when students’ population is too large and communication facilities are inadequate. The effect of these shortcomings is poor overall performance of engineering students across the board. These are "verbalisers”, Laboratory Work Laboratory work are designed to inculcate in the engineering students the ability to experiment and learn to confirm theories by experimentation. It teaches students that situations are never ideal and that results may be affected by a myriad of factors over which the experimentalist may or may not have control. A student who misses the opportunity toexperiment, therefore, is deprived of a most important component of his engineering education. This is the dilemma faced today by most engineering, students in Nigeria particularly those in the first generation Universities of Ibadan, Ife, Nsukka, Lagos and Benin. Laboratory equipment in these universities are obsolete or unserviceable. The few that are available are shared by an inordinately large number of students because of population explosion. In the circumstance, 15 students or more may congregate on one machine for an experiment. Only two or three of them participate actively im the assignment. The others copy the results from them without experiencing or understanding how they were obtained or derived. ‘The situation in the engineering faculties of some of the newer universities, particularly state universities is even worse. These faculties have no laboratory facilities at all. Their students do no experimental work yet they have been graduating students in engineering. The Faculty of Engineering of the Lagos State University (LASU), for instance, had no engineering laboratories at the inception of the programmes. ‘Their students’ practicals were conducted in the University of Lagos for some consideration. Later, these arrangements were terminated by the LASU authorities ostensibly because of poor funding. What they do now is what even their own students derisorily describe as “Alternative to Practicals” This is a very bad situation indeed, ‘The products of the programmes will have considerable difficulty relating what they learnt in the university with the reality of industry. Such graduates will require some special practical training to cure the inadequacies of their undergraduate studies. Common Examination System The nature of engineering curricula in Nigerian universities at the moment allows each programme to emphasize different aspects of engincering practice. Whereas some are design-oriented, some are inclined to general practice, business or synthesis. Naturally, these differences in orientation will manifest in the relative capacities of the products of the programmes to cope with the technical demands of specific industries. Those whose education have been oriented to the core engineering, focus ofa given industry would perform on the job while others with different orientation may not be able to deliver. This type of situation has led to a clamour for local standardization of engineering curricula and institution of a common engineering examination system. Ojiako (11) has argued that a common degree examination for all universities will be an imaginative innovation that will give the country a unique engineering education system. He believes that the adoption of the system will stimulate students and teachers alike to work harder for better all round results. On the negative side of the debate, however, is the fact that common examination system presumes a common course content in all the universities. It will be difficult to imagine how university autonomy will not be harmed and how the unique character which every university ought to have can be sustained. Common examination system can not be operated if each university must address the problems of the area in which it is situated by mounting programmes or instituting courses and orientating, them in such a way as to address their needs.Local industries should shape the form and content of courses a university offers if the institution is to be relevant. In the circumstance, it will be difficult to justify the institution of a common national examination system. CONCLUSION From the foregoing discussion, it may be concluded that (1) _ there is need to specify clearly the goals of engineering education and match assessment methods with the goals (2) the focus of engineering programmes should be to produce personnel that are capable of responding to the changing needs of industry (3) __ the practical training content of engineering education should be increased. It is suggested that a one-year industrial training scheme be introduced after the fourth year of the programme (4) leading edge technologies should be deployed to improve the quality of instruction in engineering programmes (5) Engineering programmes should be adequately funded (6) The academic requirements for registration in engineering programme should include Further Mathematics and Technical Drawing. This will assist in ensuring that only good candidates are admitted and the resulting graduates are of good quality. REFERENCES 1. C.O. Folayan The state of faculties and schools of Engineering in Nigerian Universities Proceedings, National Conference on future of Engineering Education in Nigeria (1991) pp 6-14 2 O. C. Okeke Problems of Engineering Education in Nigeria: A challenge to Industries. Proceedings, National conference on future of Engineering, Education in Nigeria (1991) pp 111-121 3. TL Raji Strategies for improving the quality of Engineering Education in Nigeria. Proceedings, National Conference on future of Engineering Education in Nigeria (1991) pp 60-67 4, S.A. Balogun The Role of Admission, Instruction and Examination Processing on Nigeria University Degrees. Proceedings, National Summit on Education 2002 (In Print). 5. JJ. Sparkes 4010. Quality in Engineering Education International Journal Continuing Engineering Education (1990) Vol. 1, No. 1, pp 18-32 AB. Fagunwa Policy Options or a sound engineering education Keynote Address, National Conference on the Future of Engineering Education in Nigeria (1991) pp 1-5 C.H. Chen The Entangling relations among the quantity, quality and cost of higher education - A dilemma confronting private colleges and universities in Taiwan. Proceedings, 3° International Conference on Quality, Reliability and Maintenance (2000) PP 277-280. S. Buchsbaum Meeting the Challenge: A viewspoint from American Industry Proceedings, International Symposium for Engineering Deans and Industry leaders (1989) pp 3-9 A Boubakeur and A. Quabdesselam University - Industry development factor Proceedings, 3 International conference on Quality, Reliability and Maintenance (2000) pp 269-272 D.R., Reyes - Guerra Where are we now? Proceedings, International symposium for Engineering Deans and Industry leaders (1989) pp 44-53 G.U. Ojiako On some aspects of improving engineering education and training in Nigeria Proceedings, National Conference on future of Engineering, Education in Nigeria (1991) pp (49-59). 4