Podcast Transcript – Engineering Education: Perspectives from South Korea
Education across the globe has seen monumental shifts in the last four years, and the field of engineering is no exception. This episode of “Innovation in the Classroom”, welcomes Shannon O’Donnell, who leads global academic engagement at Siemens DISW, for an engaging discussion with Dr. H.J. Yim, a professor of engineering at Hongik University, and Dr Donghyuk Shin, an assistant professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
Tune in to the episode to hear Dr. Yim and Dr. Shin’s perspectives on the global collaboration between industry and academia, the importance of integrating real-world learning into the classroom, and engineering education in South Korea!
In this episode, you will learn about:
- Engineering education in South Korea and global collaborations. (4:43)
- Engineering education and industry needs. (8:28)
- Progress in sustainability education in South Korea (18:14)
- Adapting to technological changes in the classroom. (21:19)
Connect with Dr. Yim:
Connect with Dr. Donghyuk Shin:
Connect with Shannon O’Donnell:
Connect with Dora Smith:
Podcast Transcript
[00:00:00] Dora Smith: Welcome to Innovation in the Classroom by the Siemens Empowers Education team. I’m Dora Smith. Education across the globe has seen monumental shifts in the last four years, and the field of engineering is no exception. Today, we’ve invited Shannon O’Donnell, who leads global academic engagement at Siemens Digital Industry Software, to help us talk about engineering education in South Korea.
[00:00:26] Dr. H.J. Yim: We need to work harder to make academia and university closer. We need to learn from best practices around the world. But this kind of collaboration cannot be done only by one side’s attempt. For those who are eager to reach out and collaborate with the other side, They have to be more open minded and they have to try to understand the position that the other party is residing in so that they should try harder to collaborate and bring the state of the art education to the classroom.
This is not only good for the students and university, but this is also good for the industry because Once the students are well prepared for real world problems.
[00:01:34] Shannon O’Donnell: Hi, I’m Shannon O’Donnell. You’ve just heard Dr. H. J. Yim, a professor of engineering in South Korea, describe his outlook on the future of engineering in his home country and across the globe. Recently, I sat down with Dr. Yim and Dr. Dong Hyuk Shin, engineering educators at South Korean universities, to talk about their experiences in the field.
Their advice for fellow engineering educators and how diversifying education plays an important role in future success as a PhD graduate of MIT, also known as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Dr. Yim has contributed to research topics like ultrasonic testing and industrial design.
Now he calls Seoul’s Hongik University his home.
[00:02:23] Dr. H.J. Yim: My department has a long name, which is mechanical and system design engineering. Twenty three years ago, we started to introduce industrial design elements into mechanical engineering education. So we have a design in the name of the department. We introduced some courses to teach engineers some basics of industrial design so that they can do some aesthetic design when they make some CAD models of the product.
We have been doing this with with a lot of help from the industrial design faculty members within our university. We have made some success in fostering our students. To be equipped with mostly mechanical engineering knowledge, but also some elements of industrial design element. That’s a kind of unique thing for our department.
[00:03:22] Shannon O’Donnell: Dr. Shin earned his Ph. D. in aerospace engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Now he serves as an assistant professor in the same department at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology University of Georgia. Sometimes known as KAIST, where his specialty is in thermal fluids.
[00:03:43] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: I lived in many different countries, so I received my bachelor’s degree in Korea, and then doctorate degree in the U. S. A., and then worked in France and in the U. K., and then lectured in the U. K., and then back to Korea, started the job as an assistant professor in Korea. So I’m kind of exposed to different education system worldwide.
Most of course I’m teaching is related to some of fluids. So, at KAIS, I’m lecturing three courses. One is, , heat transfer as an undergraduate course. And then,the other two graduate course is computational fluid dynamics, which I’m using,Siemens software. And then the last one is, turbulent combustion and combustion dynamics.
[00:04:28] Shannon O’Donnell: For Dr. Yim’s students at Hongik University, one of the most invaluable opportunities they receive is the ability to collaborate with other schools internationally.
[00:04:40] Dr. H.J. Yim: We have been doing a collaboration, global collaboration course with Aachen University in Germany. They don’t have industrial design department within their university.
So they have been seeking for Some kind of active industrial design education resource abroad, because they value the global collaboration very highly. We started this kind of course a long time ago, and I think it’s the 10th year this year. And we teach engineering design as well as industrial design to a mixed group of students.
Who are, of course, German students and Korean students, as well as the mechanical engineering students and industrial design students in the university. And the course is run mostly online throughout the semester, but there are a couple of windows which allow offline collaboration. The German students come to Korea for about a week and we go to Germany for about a week.
[00:05:48] Shannon O’Donnell: As it turns out, there are several dynamics at play that make German universities ideal international collaborators.
[00:05:57] Dr. H.J. Yim: Some people say that Why do you collaborate with German universities, not with American universities? Because you have been educated in the United States. The first thing is practical reason, and that is the time zone, time difference between Korea and Germany is much easier to do this kind of collaborative course than those universities in the United States, particularly the East Coast universities in the United States is rather okay, but the West Coast universities is very hard to make the time match with each other.
The second reason is actually this is more in depth reason. The industry structure of Korea is much closer to that of Germany, not to that of the United States. In the sense that Korean industry is mostly based on manufacturing industry as well, and particularly we rely on exports and imports and the international trade.
[00:07:06] Shannon O’Donnell: And when it comes to a successful future in the engineering field, having exposure to an international environment can be a crucial experience.
[00:07:15] Dr. H.J. Yim: The students who take this kind of global collaboration course are much better prepared for the future. Their future global collaboration when they are hired by companies, particularly big companies such as LG, Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, SK, those big companies probably you may have heard of before, but these companies have a lot of global operations as well as global partners.
So, when the students get jobs in those big companies. They have to collaborate with, foreigners and being prepared for that kind of collaboration by doing, some collaborative, global collaborative project within these courses is very beneficial. And we have seen a lot of success stories, not only from the Korean students cases, but also from German students cases.
[00:08:16] Shannon O’Donnell: But diversification of knowledge isn’t just important in a global sense. It also matters when implementing a cross disciplinary approach.
[00:08:24] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: We’re encouraging students to be exposed to many different knowledge. And then I believe that in industry, when you enter the industry, even though you graduate from aerospace engineering, you are required to know many more.
For example, legal constraints. I think that especially aeronautics, legal constraints is a very strong one. So you need to know a little bit about the law. And then material is very important, so aircraft has to have a very light and strong material. Anyway, you will be exposed to this large amount of constraint, and then in order to solve the constraint, you need to have a wider knowledge.
[00:09:05] Shannon O’Donnell: When it comes to students entering the engineering job market, there’s often a bit of disconnect between what schools are able to teach in four years versus what companies and industry expect from new graduates.
[00:09:19] Dr. H.J. Yim: There is a significant issue that is mismatched between the contents of university education and the skill set that the companies really need from the students or from their new employees.
But the problem is there are so many different skill sets depending on different companies or different industrial factors. So we cannot teach all those skill sets. Within four years, it would take maybe 40 years to teach all of them. We teach the basic principles and basic concepts only, and then the students need to learn some more specific knowledge in the company and try to apply the basic concepts they have learned from the university to their work or to their tasks.
[00:10:14] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: University can be the last place you can learn about complicated theory. So after you graduate, you will not really come back to textbook with a lot of equations and stuff. So theory is quite useful in engineering, especially when it comes to optimization or compromise.
So I believe engineering is all about compromise, so you need to make a best product out of, , limited resources. For example, if you do computational fluid dynamics, you’d like to have access to a supercomputer. However, accessing a supercomputer is very expensive, so you need to have a small amount of computing resource, and then have to produce the meaningful results out of that.
My primary goal is to adapt students to the industrial environment as quickly as possible. And then also they are quite successful in industry and then bringing better products. And then essentially it’ll kind of help our country to be more better place.
[00:11:20] Shannon O’Donnell: One of the ways professors are working to help mitigate this issue, provide students with real world applications.
[00:11:27] Dr. H.J. Yim: I Co teach with another professor who has a lot of industrial experience and who is also running a design office at the same time as he works as a professor. So we can provide some kind of real field problems and give a term project to the students so that they can design something such as electric motor speed reduction systems, things like that.
So the students actually have a lot of problems and difficulties in dealing with that problem, but they also say that they have learned a lot from those projects and appreciate the opportunity to do that kind of project.
[00:12:14] Shannon O’Donnell: These kinds of real world scenarios are part of the future. also lead to the opportunity for a bit of hands on learning.
[00:12:21] Dr. H.J. Yim: I teach product quality engineering. And in that course, I teach what is called the robust design concept. When you make things,you cannot make things accurately, exactly to the print. You cannot do that. So all the components are a little off from the print. So when you try to assemble them you may get into trouble and also the quality of the assembly will not be as good as you want. This is called a variation and variation is harmful to the quality of the product. Robust design is a principle for the methodology to make the product insensitive or less sensitive to variations. If you can achieve that, then you can make the product much easier and much more inexpensively.
So that’s a very good strategy for designing products. Many automotive OEMs around the world are trying to apply this kind of methodology.
[00:13:32] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: I started lecturing CFD course. The previous course was designed to write your own code. Then it’s , 2D rectangular design. So the problem is almost to fix something called the back step forwarding, or the lead driven cavity basically shape each rectangular.
However, the real application, real industry is not like rectangular, it’s aerodynamics. They like a pretty smooth, smooth one. And then it’s not two dimensional, so also, as the things, so for example, I’m working for engines, and then whenever engine is already there for 100 years now, and then what we need to do is we need to improve the 0.5 percent efficiency increase, or the 1 percent reduction on carbon dioxide, and so forth, so. Things we have to do is very much more challenging than our previous engineers. And then in order to achieve that, we have to, on the same engine, we have to apply many different kinds of techniques simultaneously.
[00:14:43] Shannon O’Donnell: For engineering educators, some of the most valuable tech tools available have proven to be those provided by Siemens. Hongik University is home to the Siemens Pace Center. Through smart manufacturing, the center manages and nurtures students learning design and engineering.
[00:15:00] Dr. H.J. Yim: We teach the basic principles to the students, then the examples are very simple, but real world problems are very complex and very complicated.
So the engineers cannot solve those problems by hand, so they always use software. When we teach some courses in junior and senior classes, we heavily depend on those software for computer aided engineering. Without those software, we cannot even, even attack to solve those problems. So we teach our students how to use them first and then Let them play with them, and then most of them can just figure out what the result is by themselves.
And this is a very important learning process. I teach mechanical engineering to industrial design students. And if you try to imagine how I can do that. It’s very tough, they don’t know the basic calculus, basic mathematics, so they don’t know how to integrate or differentiate, and they don’t know the concepts of vectors and things like that.
But the way I do in the course is I teach the basic concepts without using equations. I just use some, some images and some animations and some body gestures. To explain those concepts. And then, I let them use a software which is called Discovery Live. That software gives you almost real time answer.
They just play with this software. They can learn mechanics by doing it. By giving a lot of trials to the problem.
[00:16:52] Shannon O’Donnell: When looking forward to the future of engineering, as in so many other areas of technology, the biggest trend enhancing curriculum is artificial intelligence. Although the tech is trending toward ai, engineering schools aren’t quite there with their courses yet.
[00:17:11] Dr. H.J. Yim: Many things are about artificial intelligence, ai. Many companies in South Korea are also. Trying to incorporate AI into their products and, or into their operation of the company. Some of them have made some advance in that approach, and some of them are just, , planning to do that. But we, as a university, has to prepare students for their future jobs.
So, we try to incorporate some of those AI elements in some of the courses. We, as a mechanical engineering based department, cannot make AI a course, a single course, but we try to introduce some of the applications of AI in many courses.
[00:18:08] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: It’s a little bit difficult to kind of follow the very recent trend in the, in the classroom.
If we change the curriculum too quickly, then the fairness in evaluation can be out of control a little bit. So we can do it slowly. I tried to add some extra slides, so how AI can help in the aerospace engineering, but I cannot really plug in AI into my heat transfer course or computational fluid dynamics.
So that’s a little bit, I mean, challenging we are facing at But at the same time, we offer something called extra curriculum course. So they can cover a little bit need to learn AI.
[00:18:49] Shannon O’Donnell: When it comes to trends, South Korea still has a way to go in the realm of sustainability, but more and more strides have been made recently.
[00:19:01] Dr. H.J. Yim: South Korean industry is based on manufacturing industry. Our major players in the industry produce a lot of emission, a lot of greenhouse gas. They cannot reduce that so drastically. It’s very slow, but people slowly gaining the awareness of,the importance of sustainability. There are some new courses which actually addressing sustainability, and which is Regenerative energy design,it used to be just energy and heat system design, but my colleagues have changed the name of the course into regenerative energy and heat system design.
We need to try our best and try harder to produce more courses and force our students to be able to do more things in this field.
[00:20:00] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: When It comes to sustainability, it’s changing the classroom itself. So, nowadays, there’s no paper, which was a little bit surprised to me when I first started teaching. So, students don’t bring textbooks.
They don’t have a notepad. Instead, they have an iPad, and then they look at the lecture notes online, or they download from a kind of PDF. And then whenever they write, they write on, on iPad. And initially, I thought that’s not good for education. You need to have some heavy text to carry around. And then you have to flip through it.
But now I kind of accept it. So it’s normal not having paper. And they still, students perform almost same way, I mean, same way, the grade, , same, and that’s kind of one of the change in, in classroom due to sustainability.
[00:20:56] Shannon O’Donnell: To wrap up our conversation, Dr. Yim and Dr. Shin both offered their words of advice for engineering educators. The main idea, keeping up with the ever evolving slate of technology is one of the most important aspects of the job.
[00:21:13] Dr. H.J. Yim: Technology changes at a very Our role is to prepare our students to work in the fast changing industrial field.
Just staying within the university, you cannot learn the trend or the changes that the companies are experiencing. So you have to make up your your network with the companies as much as possible and try to follow up the trend and update to yourself to so that you teach the state of the art technology to the students.
It’s not the details of the technology that you can teach to the students. Then, at least, you, you figure out what is the basic concept that the students need to know in order to be able to work in this kind of new environment. So you have to keep yourself updated at all times.
[00:22:16] Dr. Donghyuk Shin: Things are changing very quickly.
Students keep changing. And then I have to keep up with the changes, too, because I have to deliver lecture effectively, not continue to write on the blackboard. So I need to prepare material in such a way students are more comfortable with. For instance, nowadays, a lot of the online video, especially I’m in heat transfer course, I’m adopting pre recorded lecture. Initially, I thought this is not a good idea. I always have to interact with the student to deliver a lecture. However, I find out that Tron is also quite like the pre recorded lecture. So they mentioned that if they don’t understand certain portion, they continue to repeat that portion.
So that they can have a better understanding. Five years later, we need to do some 3D lecturing. So not just the video itself, you need to have a 3D camera so that it’s more interactive. Or there is AR or VR, right? So, You have to wear a kind of glass to do lecturing. I think COVID make the biggest impact on education.
I think that all university is ready to offer remote lecturing, but I mean, COVID is one change and then still over the time, I think that. Things continue to change and then, as an educator, we need to embrace the change and then apply that to class, in the classroom.
[00:23:52] Dora Smith: A big thank you to Dr. H. J. Yim and Dr. Dong Hyuk Shin for taking time out of their busy schedules to speak with us today about engineering education in South Korea and its continuously evolving curriculum. This has been an Innovation in the Classroom episode. Stay tuned to wherever you do podcasts. I’m Dora Smith.
Thanks so much for listening.
