Engineering project to foster global competency and assessment of learning outcomes using the prog test

We designed and have been executing a cross-cultural engineering project since 2013. This engineering educational project was designed to foster innovative and global engineers and scientists based on multidisciplinary, multinational, and industry-academia collaborative project-based learning. The students participated in the project were first-year graduates and third- and fourth-year undergraduates. There were various nationalities including Japanese, Thai, Indonesian, Cambodian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Singaporean, Mongolian, German, Polish, Dutch, and Brazilian. The project themes were related to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) such as energy, transportation, environment, poverty, natural disasters, and education as well as practical issues in industries. Multinational student teams were required to not only identify and define social, technical, and interdisciplinary problems but to design and prototype solutions as well. The quality assurance of the educational program was achieved by analysis of the results in (1) learning outcomes based on rubrics and (2) a generic skill assessment test of the PROG (Progress Report on Generic Skills). The PROG assesses competencies in working skills, personal skills, and problem-solving skills. It is one of the commonly used measurement methods introduced to 470 higher educational institutes in Japan. This paper shows comparative data of average PROG scores among global workers in Asia, model domestic workers, and university students. The global workers marked higher scores than other groups at all of the survey elements particularly in “relating with others,” “team management,” and “self-control.” Furthermore, it was proved that cross-cultural engineering project contributed to developing these three elements of competencies.