customer oriented engineering education in the 21st century

the increasing rate of privatization in various sectors has made the engineering education centers to take a good look at the needs and interests of both students and the industry. this is considered to be a vital step in surviving in today’s very competitive environment. the non interactive traditional training method without considering students’ needs and using training methods inconsistent with the time and place no longer could continue to exist. in the customer oriented education system, the objective of students is to learn the subject matters which could help them to live on and make money. on the other hand, the professors’ aims are to present practical materials in an appropriate format to keep their jobs and assure timely promotion. the main features of the customer oriented engineering education model are: problem based course content, inherent entrepreneurship by objective oriented training, team work promoting approach, tangible training with the use of practical examples, multi-media based training method, and real life student evaluation scheme. if this training model is implemented it is expected to have graduates with the following characteristics: high confidence when encountering real world problems, superior analyzing ability, high communication skills and group work attitude, ability to make proper changes in processes with the aim of improving the performance within the usual time and operational constraints. in the last 14 years, this teaching method was partially implemented at the mining engineering group of the shahid bahonar university of kerman in undergraduate and graduate levels. to evaluate the performance of the model, every semester a survey was carried out using a questionnaire for all courses. in total, 1125 students were participated in the survey over the years. the results indicated that over 91% of students were satisfied with the method. in order to use this training model successfully the instructors need to spend significant amount of time in comparison with the traditional training method. this turns to be a big challenge and the main obstacle against implantation of this model in a wider range.