Aligning an engineering education program to the Washington Accord requirements: example of the University of Botswana

The accreditation systems of engineering education programs governed by the Washington Accord have evolved in order to respond to modern technological and scientific development. The principal purpose of the paper is to indicate that the process re-engineering model commonly employed in business environments can also be used in an educational system. In particular, the paper describes the process of re-engineering used for the transformation of the BEng (Mech) program in order to align it with the accreditation requirements. The study adopts a Business Re-engineering Process (BRP) in which engineering education is considered as a process. A modified McKinsey's re-engineering model was chosen as a tool to re-engineer the educational system. The model involves five broad phases, namely, identification, review&analysis, re-design, test & implementation and continuous improvement. The paper concentrates on the first two phases. The existing curriculum is mapped according to the graduate attributes, competency profiles and the Exit Level Outcomes of the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA). From the list of identified deficiencies it can be concluded that the major shortcoming of the program is not its content but its delivery. It is recommended that innovative flexible delivery methods should be used as teaching styles.