Creating a Learning Environment for Engineering Education

Until recently discussions about improvement of educational quality have focussed on the teacher – it was as-sumed that by training the teacher you could increase the students’ learning outcome. Realising that other changes than better teaching were necessary to give the students more useful competencies, the idea of faculty development was introduced. But even this is not enough. The saying has for some time been ‘from teaching to learning’, but very little attention has actually been on the students’ learning through active studying; how should the student study in a learning-effective way? And the introduction of IT has highlighted the importance of the learning environment, but the focus has narrowly been on the physical environment. However, the mental frame-work is also very important. To assure educational quality it is necessary to take all these elements into account and consider the total learning environment as an integrated whole.