Abstract
Higher education institutions and their engineering departments have a vital role in fulfilling the new requirements and opportunities of the information and communication technologies (ICT). Therefore, understanding the guidelines to adapt to the new ICT innovations in relation with the Fourth Industrial Revolution such as the internet of things, cloud computing, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence is vital to determine the emerging patterns in their development, delivery, implementation, and assessment. This study aims to define the new educational requirements in engineering education based on the developments of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Conducting an in-depth analysis of the current literature revealed that although these emerging technologies have been widely used, there are some challenges being faced for their effective use in engineering education. Therefore, the authors provide some guidelines and discuss possible research directions for the use of these technologies in near future.
TopMethodology Of The Literature Analysis
In this section, we report the results of our meta-analysis study, through which we achieve the research objective, and elaborate on the interesting results emerged from the extracted data.
The in Depth Review Approach
The in depth analysis of the literature was conducted in this research to:
- 1.
Provide an overview of the influence of emerging technologies on engineering education.
- 2.
Develop an understanding of these technologies that allow students, teachers and institutions to assess and improve engineering education.
- 3.
Develop an approach that can make these emerging technologies to develop engineering education.
- 4.
Provide recommendations for the use of emerging technologies in higher education engineering by demonstrating the relevance and guidelines for “easy” implementation of emerging technologies of engineering education.
However, findings cannot be generalized due to the limited number of resources, references and studies found in the area under study. This is attributed to the fact that the study area is new and, therefore the accuracy of the findings is not conclusive. Further, inconsistency across the reviewed studies is affected by differences between study methods and processes.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Virtual Reality: Is “an artificial environment that is created with software and presented to the user in such a way that the user suspends belief and accepts it as a real environment” ( https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-reality ).
Cloud Computing: Is “the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer” ( http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/cloud%20computing AU101: The URL http://english.oxforddictionaries.com/cloud%20computing has been redirected to https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/cloud computing. Please verify the URL. ).
Artificial Intelligence: Is a combination of both software and hardware components, for example, the robots on a car assembly line and the software that controls them.
Internet of Things: Is an intelligent interactivity between human and things to exchange information and knowledge for new value creation. It encompasses three main technology components, namely connected things with embedded sensors, connectivity and infrastructure, and analytics and applications.