Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 26-1 - 29

educationI&M
in
Sergio Rapuano
Instrumentation and Measurement Education Around the World and
the Instrumentation and Measurement Society Educational Offerings
T
he knowledge about Instrumentation and Measurement
(I&M) is crucial in the expertise of any Electrical
and Electronics Engineer (EEE) and in the much wider
Science, Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
education. " The I&M education is of interest to a number of
stakeholders. Measurement standards
provide the foundation for commerce.
Equipment companies need fresh ideas in
order to innovate and produce improved
instrumentation products " [1]. The increasing
adoption of digital electronics within
industrial processes requires practitioners
and researchers to possess measurement
concepts and to know how instruments
work and are operated. Industry 4.0, in particular,
relies heavily on I&M to create and
update digital twins of physical elements of
the production process. As a consequence,
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), mainly academic ones,
must keep up the pace by developing new knowledge in I&M
and transmitting it through undergraduate and graduate programs.
However, identifying and satisfying the education
needs in I&M field can be extremely complex, due to the characteristics
of the subject.
The main dual-face characteristic is that " I&M is but one of
many areas of concentration that fall under other, broader disciplines "
[1]. As a consequence, the educators can be divided
in two distinct groups: those considering I&M as a subject
functional to several 'main' disciplines, like physics, communications,
electronics, computer science; and those considering
I&M as a discipline on its own, built from subjects coming from
the 'main' disciplines but 'secondary' to none. Even when I&M
is considered a discipline it can be either considered functional
to the 'main' ones or specific to other disciplines. Therefore, the
academic programs follow at least four different approaches:
1. the basic I&M knowledge is provided within the 'main'
disciplines, introducing only what is strictly needed,
like how to manage an oscilloscope for a particular
experiment;
2. the basic I&M knowledge is provided in specific courses
outlining the main topics of the discipline; those subjects
are often located in the first years and provide basic
knowledge for broader audiences;
February 2023
3. specific courses are included in the degree programs and
called " instrumentation, " " measurement, " " sensors " or
similar. Sometimes they are in the last years and provide
specific knowledge linked to applications and required
by a graduate profile;
4. whole degree programs are devoted to I&M very rarely.
The heterogeneous scenario described above becomes even
more complex when cultural and historical differences among
countries come into play. Different countries have different
education systems, different degree levels, different job opportunities
and requirements for engineers.
Differences in Higher Education Systems
Considering the higher education systems, there are countries
where the HEIs are founded as a rationalized network
by a centralized entity, like a government or a parliament, and
countries where HEIs are founded by a mix of private and public
initiatives. In the second group of countries the educational
offerings of HEIs are much more difficult to be classified.
To identify a key to interpretation, I have asked several
colleagues spread all over the world to provide me with basic
information based on their personal experience about the
higher education systems and the I&M education in their
countries. The following considerations are based on such
information, so they have no statistical value and cannot describe
either accurately or completely the situation of I&M
education in the world. However, from the information collected
an incomplete picture emerges of the heterogeneity in
the I&M education in countries different in terms of population,
gross product and geographical location.
The first element of diversity is the size of the higher education
systems, in terms of number of HEIs, which is not
necessarily proportional to the population size. For example:
in Brazil there are about 2500 HEIs. Only about 300 of them are
public. A much bigger country like China, instead, has only
about 300 HEIs, all of them public. In Mexico, there are about
5500 HEIs, where about 41% are public and 59% are private,
while New Zealand has eight universities that are all public
ones. The universities in the USA number 2670, with 74% public
and 26% private ones, while there are 47 HEIs in Sweden,
including two private and 45 public.
The type of HEI can be different or not, depending on
the country. The most common higher education system is
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