Integrating Industry 4.0 Concepts in Civil Engineering Education

Abstract

Opportunities to improve students’ civil engineering skills for Industry 4.0 and train them for potential challenges in their professional careers go beyond industry sponsorship of capstone design projects. Students and faculty can benefit from industry mentors’ involvement who can use their expertise in addressing design problems and are enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge with students. Practicing engineers have a relevant, realistic, real-world viewpoint on their subject and reinforce their relevance to professional engineering practices. Students benefit tremendously from working on real-world problems of interest to industry, business, company-specific project management, product creation processes, and experience with financial, legal, and regulatory design constraints. This paper offers an overview of the multidisciplinary capstone design course in the civil engineering curriculum in Jordan and highlights relevant practices. It provides valuable guidance for incorporating Industry 4.0 skills into the teaching of capstone design courses to deal with challenges related to the context of digital transformation. The paper concludes that industry integration in engineering curriculum can generate multi-skilled and competent engineers with essential cognitive skills such as creativity, complex information processing, and lifelong learning.

Keywords

• capstone design projects
• civil engineering curriculum
• industry 4.0
• professional engineering practices
• university-industry collaboration