University of Technical Education HCMC is organizing a series of workshops on ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology) for its deans, managers, department heads and faculty from July 25^th 2013 to August 7^th 2013. The workshops are funded by the Fulbright Specialist Program through the US Embassy in Vietnam and University of Technical Education HCMC. 

Around 50 deans, vice deans, managers, department heads attended a two-day workshop and consultancy on “Overview of ABET and roadmap to ABET for UTE”. A one-day workshop on “Teaching leadership and soft skills for undergraduates” attracted over 90 key faculty and deans who would be teaching those skills for students. Interesting discussion and action plan of integrating leadership and soft skills to the current curricula to produce engineers as “Engineers in the 21^st century” have been taken place during the workshop.





Deans, managers discussion during the workshop

Two 3-day workshops (for two groups) on ABET are designed for faculty who directly design their courses, teach and assess students. In this workshop, faculty will be providing a brief over of ABET, ABET student outcomes and many activities related to curriculum design and assessment. Faculty will be practicing writing their program education objectives to align with UTE’s mission, mapping current program outcomes to ABET student outcomes, mapping their course objectives with their program outcomes, developing assessment plan for their courses and many other activities. Faculty will be also discussing and developing action plan to teach leadership and soft skills in their courses if relevant. The first 3-day workshop attracted over 120 faculty and 90 other faculty have registered to participate the second workshop. Those workshops also attracted 10 members from other universities and colleges.





Faculty briefing their group discussion at the Workshop on ABET for Faculty

The Fulbright scholar, Professor John Vail Farr, is an expert in ABET. He has been the team chair of many ABET visits over the years. Professor Farr is currently the director of the Nation Reconstruction and Capacity Development Research Center of The United States Military Academy at West Point (USMA). Before USMA, Prof Farr had joined Steven University as a dean.

ABET is widely adopted in the US and in many cases, universities have to have their engineering programs to be accredited by ABET to be eligible for running and many professional bodies require engineers to graduate from ABET accredited programs to practice their engineering profession. ABET has accredited over 3,100 programs all over the world. Regionally, Singapore, the Philippines and Malaysia have had their engineering and technology programs to be accredited by ABET.

With a vision “Comprehensive, Sustainable Development and International Integration”, UTE sets to have their strong engineering programs to be accredited by ABET by 2018. This is also partly UTE commitment in an agreement with Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training, Intel Vietnam, US Agency for International Development (USAID) and Arizona State University in the US in HEEAP 2.0 project.