A Blended Academia – Industry Learning Model for Aircraft Composite Structures Education
Michael C Richey 1, Boeing Learning Training and Development, Everett, Washington Kuen Lin 2, Professor, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Seattle, Washington Michael Mohaghegh 3, Boeing Payloads and Structures Engineering, Everett, Washington
Advanced composite materials such as carbon fiber reinforced plastics are being applied to many aircraft structures, including the Boeing 787, to improve performance and decrease weight. Composites will make up approximately 50% of the weight of the Boeing Advanced Dreamliner, which is a sharp increase from the 12% figure for the Boeing 777.
 To address the competency shift from metals to composite structures, the Boeing Commercial Airplane Structures Group and the Boeing Learning, Training, and Development engineering group have partnered with the University of Washington’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics to develop multiple certificate programs in aircraft structures and composite design, analysis, and manufacturing.
These state-of-the-art training courses integrate cooperative learning methods through academic– industrial partnerships and are built on the philosophy that learners learn best through active engagement in meaningful activities.
More than half of the current science and engineering workforce are age 40 or over, and will retire by the end of this decade. New entrants into science and engineering fields are not replacing these retirees in sufficient numbers. The impending retirement of the baby boomers means that nearly 7 million people who currently hold key managerial, professional, and technical jobs could retire over the next 10 years. A serious lack of skilled workers began in 2005 and will grow to 5.3 million by 2010 and to 14 million by 2015.
The Boeing Company is not immune to the effects of globalization and increasing competition for knowledge workers. According to a recent Boeing Frontiers article, key trends driving this transformation include:
- U.S. Immigration policies
- Woman and minorities in the workplace
- Retiring baby boomers
If you subscribe to the “Flat World” perspective, educating future engineers and technicians will require a restructuring of the engineering core and a new partnership with industry to provide focused research and application opportunities with graduate schools and a new partnership model with academia for advancing engineering education in a “flattened world”. Theses forces promise to reshape the way we educate our workforce and retain our nation’s scientific and technological prominence.
Instructional System Design is one strategy utilized for addressing new educational needs, and this approach has been used in the UW/Boeing educational partnership. This model states the conditions of learning as:
- Learning is the acquisition of increasing complex structures of learned capabilities that build on prior learning
- No one set of characteristics can be applied to all learning
- An adequate conception of human learning should apply to all the various contexts in which learning occurs
Understanding how students assimilate, process, and use information, and how culture and student–instructor modeling affect knowledge transfer will ultimately help construct pedagogies that will accelerate the “novice to expert” timeline. In addition, the UW/Boeing team is exploring learning sciences and technologies that will enable a global learning environment. This research includes the exploration of:
- User communities leveraging Wiki’s, content on demand (similar to U-Tube)
- Extending knowledge objects to the informal environment through Video I-Pods
- Pod casts Gadgets
- User community blogs
- Immersive learning environments
- Informal communities of users and their social knowledge networks
- Self-authored user networks
The complete paper is available at the AIAA website.
The paper number is AIAA 2007-2229 |
