Work in progress — The age of apathy: Reigniting engineering educating

The last several decades have seen great changes in education. Technology has altered both the way we teach and learn. Students today are cited as being no less inherently intelligent than their peers of the past but as being much less focused and much less capable of the inductive thinking required for innovation. The attitude has shifted from needing to understand the basics to relying on technological resources to provide the answers. The result is students who are able to solve problems more efficiently than 30 years ago but who lack the understanding necessary to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable findings. While faculty are finding fault in the unfocused student, students feel neglected by the faculty. As university priorities shift from education to innovation in pursuit of research funding, students suffer from inattentive professors. Between running a quality laboratory, applying for grants, and publishing papers, faculty have little time left to devote to the other portion of their job - teaching. This lack of time results in uninteresting lectures, unattended office hours, and a growing gap between students and instructors. As learning becomes less personal, interest and motivation fade, compounding the effect of any potential technology-induced attention problems.