A Global Network for Standards Education and Research

1
A Global Network for Standards Education and
Research

• William E. KellyDepartment of Civil
  EngineeringThe Catholic University of
  AmericaWashington, DC 20064

2
Education of Future Engineers

• Engineering standards are an integral part of
  engineering design education in the United States
  
• See Criterion 4 of the ABET Engineering Criteria
• Global or international standards will be
  increasingly important in engineering work

3
Standards Education for Engineers

• Knowledge of standards in design field
• Appreciation of the role of regulatory standards
  that could affect products
• Appreciation of intellectual property law and
  technical barriers to trade issues.

4
Professional Societies and Standards
Organizations

• Standards organizations and professional
  societies in the U.S. and internationally are
  upgrading their educational and outreach programs
  to provide educational opportunities for students
  and continuing education opportunities for
  professionals.
• Much of this is likely to be web based.
• See as an example the American National
  Institute's (ANSI) portal to online learning
  http//www.standardslearn.org/home/

5
Networking in Higher Education

• ANSI Committee on Education
• To accomplish the U.S. National Standards
  Strategy Objective 11 promoting collaborations in
  higher education through outreach activities
  taking full advantage of IT
• See e.g. ANSIs education database
• European Commission academic educational-research
  network to promote standards education and
  research.
• See e.g. ECs Academic Network for Standardization

6
Activities

• Panels at Columbia University and the ANSI annual
  meeting in 2002 discussed ways to foster a broad
  cooperative international effort to include
  business, engineering, legal and policy aspects
  of standards and standardization in university
  programs in the U.S. and Europe.
• It was agreed that a first step is to develop an
  extended topical outline for standards education
  and mechanisms for sharing existing lecture
  materials.

7
Summary

• Work is underway to develop a topical outline and
  to make existing lecture materials from
  cooperating institutions available online.
• Faculty and students will have access to lectures
  by experts in Europe and the U.S. that could be
  used for self-study or by faculty members wanting
  one or more lectures in an existing course.
• As part of this effort, many lectures by outside
  experts in the Strategic Standardization course
  at Catholic University are now on the web and may
  be downloaded.
• See http//engineering.cua.edu/StandardsCenter/cen
  ter_for_global_standards_anal.cfm