Organizational study on multi-discipline based engineering education in China

There are many evidences to show that engineering education should be built on the base of multi disciplines, including technological and non-technological ones, in order to help its graduates work with cross disciplinary engineering issues in multi cultural circumstance. Therefore, if an engineering programme is supported by a number of different disciplines, the benefit to engineering education would be found not only in the integration from multi disciplinary academic resources, but also in quality and efficiency improvement. In order to facilitate the proposed multi discipline supported engineering education, a two dimensional model of academic organizations for higher engineering education is developed in this paper. Academic organizations in higher engineering education institutions are cataloged into two types which stand for real and virtual dimensions respectively in the model. All the academic organizations built based on different disciplines, such as faculties, departments, or schools are considered real organizations while all the programmes which integrate different academic resources from different disciplines are supposed to be virtual organizations. The study finds that with this model it is easy to support teaching for the new challengers of higher engineering education. Also, the study shows that the model will facilitate the quick response to the needs in society and the integration of different academic resources for teaching.