Towards a European Engineering Curriculum. The Tempus QUEECA project

The growing worldwide globalization of both productions and services requires, in the sector of the engineering professions, a concomitant globalization of the engineering curricula. Nowadays engineers are increasingly engaged in international projects; they should be able to work on multinational teams all around the globe collaborating on a common project through real-time electronic communication. Successful and effective collaboration requires not only the ability of participants to communicate in a common language, but also the assurance of a common level of technical understanding. Such issues are not trivial, given the global diversity of systems for educating engineers, for different goals in skills, for quality control of their education, and for regulating their professional practice. Consequently from the engineering education perspective the accreditation and the assessment of academic programmes is critical in order to maintain the quality and the status of engineering graduates, and hence the technical workforce. In this respect the Europe-based EUR-ACE system, started in 2007 and run now by ENAEE (European Network for Accreditation of Engineering Education), represents an effective framework and accreditation system that provides a set of standards that identifies high quality engineering degree programmes in Europe and abroad. The EUR-ACE system represents a systematic and shared global model of engineering accreditation that can be used to assess global professional skills and attributes of engineering graduates. The attractiveness of the accreditation system is shown also by its spreading toward neighbouring countries of Europe. The paper, discussing the added value of the EUR-ACE accreditation system as a European best practice example, aims to present the main outcome of the Tempus project QUEECA (Quality of Engineering Education in Central Asia) launched at a kick-off meeting in Villa Vigoni (Menaggio, Italy) in November 2012, and led by the University of Florence, School of Engineering, under the leadership of Prof. Claudio Borri. The project aims at setting up and implementing a system of Quality Assurance (QA) of Engineering Education (EE) in Central Asia countries, finalized to the pre-professional accreditation of engineering programmes (i.e. accreditation of educational programmes as entry route to the engineering profession). The accredited programmes must satisfy the same pre-requisites for the award of the EUR-ACE quality label, i.e. the EUR-ACE Framework Standards (EAFS) and the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in Higher Education.