<div>This research addresses the need to advance systems engineering education, by assessing current undergraduate systems engineering programs in the US relative to the needs of the industry. </div><div><br></div><div>We extracted over 300 expressions relevant to the systems engineer’s duties from six sources. We chose sources that address the variety in how people define “systems engineering”, the evolving nature of the field, its practical aspect and the lessons learned through experience. We used these expressions to write 35 needed learning outcomes that should be taught to systems engineering students. The outcomes fall under six broad categories relating to requirements management, solution selection and implementation, system architecture and modeling, system performance evaluation, V&V activities and project management. We then looked at what existing undergraduate systems engineering programs are teaching and extracted each program’s current learning outcomes. We compared each program’s current outcomes to the industry-based needed outcomes to determine whether students are being taught what they need to know. </div><div><br></div><div>We learned that the duties of systems engineers are not uniquely defined and prioritized by the six sources, and that academic programs do not all teach the same outcomes. We found that all</div><div>current undergraduate systems engineering programs in the US are preparing students to meet at least some of the needs of the industry, such as to “Identify stakeholder needs”, “Develop highlevel system architecture” and “Estimate cost”, but that most programs do not teach students how to “Select optimal concept” or how to “Analyze system resilience”. </div><div><br></div><div>This work motivates the need to investigate potential gaps in systems engineering education and to determine how well we are preparing students to meet the needs of the industry.</div>

<p>Systems engineering (SE) is an increasingly relevant domain in an increasingly interconnected world, but the demand for SE education is impeded by the challenges of effectively teaching interdisciplinary material that emphasizes the development of a mentality over specific skills. A modularized, asynchronous, distributed course configuration may provide an advantageous alternative to more traditional hybrid course designs. Online courses have been a topic in the educational field since the establishment of the internet. However, the widespread disruptions to higher education due to the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the demand for and difficulty of developing deliberate and robust learning environments designs that consider a variety of traditional and non-traditional students. This thesis presents a case design of a learning environment for an interdisciplinary-focused, introductory graduate-level systems course that has previously been designed for, and taught in, a hybrid environment. The case design will emphasize the information architecture (IA) and user experience (UX) prototype design of the learning environment as informed by user-centric principles, cognitive theories and analyses, the IA literature, and existing course content. This focus on learner knowledge development (“beyond-the-screen”) factors rather than the direct user interface (“at-the-screen”) provides design recommendations and insights that are robust to changing user interface trends and preferences. A distribution of learners with varying backgrounds, learning needs, and goals associated with the material will be identified. These individual differences can dramatically impact the effectiveness of potential interventions, particularly when different types of learners have directly conflicting needs. Thus, the online learning environment will utilize adaptable interfaces to move away from a “one-size-fits-all” design approach. Content modularization and non-sequential, tag-based navigation were utilized to address the challenges of teaching highly interdisciplinary material. This thesis emphasizes a learning environment design that aims to teach highly interdisciplinary systems subject matter to a variety of learners with a variety of characteristics in an asynchronous, online format while making use of existing course material. </p>

Au cours de cette thèse, nous avons examinée les pratiques actuelles en matière d'éducation en IS. Nous avons proposé une approche centrée sur l'utilisation des processus normalisés en IS, tout en faisant en sorte que le scénario d'apprentissage soit très adaptable et qu'il puisse être piloté par les compétences d'IS acquises ou à acquérir. Ensuite, une plateforme Web a été développée pour soutenir cette nouvelle approche d'apprentissage. En utilisant cette approche, les étudiants ne seront pas seulement en mesure de bien concevoir le système demandé de manière distante et collaborative, mais ils seront aussi capables de l'élaborer de manière appropriée. Cela leur permettra d'apprendre les principes et processus fondamentaux de l'IS, à mieux communiquer dans un environement de travail, la gestion d'équipe, la collaboration et les compétences techniques connexes. Les formateurs d'un autre côté pourront mieux gérer leur parcours d'apprentissage, les ressources pédagogiques, et les résultats escomptés. En utilisant cette solution, les organisations de ces formateurs et étudiants, c'est-à-dire les universités et collèges, pourront gérer et normaliser les compétences acquises par leurs futurs ingénieurs systèmes à tous les niveaux. / This thesis surveys the current practices and advancements in SE education. We ended up proposing a novel solution for SE education (an approach with its supporting web-based platform). The proposed approach is based on the recommendations of academic and industrial communities. It is centered around the use of SE standardized processes and at the same time very adaptive, with learning scenarios that can be driven by the acquired or to-be-taught SE competencies. The proposed solution is a web based platform that has been developed to support this novel approach within a distant Project Based Learning (PBL) environment. The solution aims to ease the learning at the same time of fundamental principles and processes of systems engineering, along with communication, team management, collaboration, and related soft skills. On the other hand, educators will be able to better manage their learning scenarios, training resources, and the expected outcomes. Last, educators and students' organizations using this solution will be able to manage and normalize the competencies to be acquired by their future systems engineers at every level.