An Innovation Framework to Integrate Engineering Standards into Industrial Engineering Graduate Curriculum

The importance of standards is that they provide product manufacturers with clear material, mechanical, and dimensional requirements coupled with specific quality assurance and test methods used to ensure their quality and functionality. Manufacturing-related material standards provide a consensus regarding desired properties between both manufacturers and customers. Moreover, these standards provide analysis methods to measure the properties and leads to standard manufacturing procedures that ensure the quality. To fulfill the need of real-world systems, a curriculum innovation was planned and implemented into the industrial engineering graduate program at Texas A&M University-Kingsville with the aim to integrate manufacturing-related materials and quality management standards into graduate engineering education through innovative course modules and a certificate program. There are four major components in the framework, including (1) course module development on manufacturing-related material standards, (2) course module development on manufacturing-related quality management standards, (3) graduate-level certificate program development, and (4) industrial experience sharing through webinars. ASTM and ISO standards were introduced to graduate students with hands-on experiences on applying standards to real-world case studies. It creates a systematic framework to strengthen graduate students’ education and learning about manufacturing-related materials and quality management standards and standardization. Student surveys were used to collect their feedback, which show very positive impact on the students’ knowledge and interests in standards and standardization.