My peer reviewed article this week is titled, "Engineering through distance education in the time of the fourth industrial revolution: Reflections from three decades of peer reviewed studies".  It was published as a Special Issue Article in the publication Computer Applications in Engineering Education November 23rd of 2020.   It was written by Dr. Serpil Kocdar, Dr. Aras Bozkurt and Dr. Tulay Goru Dogan who all received their PhD's in Distance Education and are all college professors in Turkey (ResearchGate, n.d.).  The aim of their study was to investigate the field of engineering through distance education by text-mining and social network analysis examining 120 publications on this topic (Kocdar, 2020).

     While examining the geographical distributions of the publications, they found that most of the educational contributions came from the United States.  They referred to our country as, "a developed country that has invested heavily in educating students through distance education" (Kocdar, 2020).  In terms of technology, they point to the invention of the steam engine and describe how that brought us in to the first industrial revolution.  They point to electric power and becoming the driving force behind the second industrial revolution.  They describe how electronics and information technology and its utilization in automating production endangered workers and was the beginning of the third industrial revolution.  Finally, they indicate how ubiquitous cyber-physical production systems introduced the fourth industrial revolution (Kocdar, 2020).  They say that the fourth industrial revolution is different than the previous ones because it is a series of new technologies that fuse the offline and online worlds. This affects different disciplines, economies and industries.  I found it interesting that they even discussed raising inquiries about what it means to be human (Kocdar, 2020).  I guess this can be compared to Facebook and their new adoption as Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta and formerly known as Facebook, Inc. (Facebook, n.d.).

            They say that our fourth industrial revolution, also referred to as the digital revolution began in the late 1970s and brought together combined technologies that started to blur the lines between the physical world, the digital world and the biological world.  They talk about a new learning idea that has come to be known as, "Education 4.0".  They say this this will add new elements to education including global citizenship skills, innovation and creativity skills, technology skills, interpersonal skills, personalized and self-paced learning, accessible and self-paced learning, problem-based and collaborative learning and finally lifelong and student-driven learning (Kocdar, 2020).  They say that this fourth industrial revolution will facilitate a sense of lifelong learning in engineers and support them in the continuous pursuit of learning and could even become an alternative to the mainstream educational method (Kocdar, 2020). 

I think almost anyone who is in school today has had at least a glimpse of what distance learning is about.  Especially with the world events that have transpired in the last couple of years.  That said, I don't believe that any American universities offer a doctorate in distance education like the authors of this peer reviewed study have received. 

 

 

Works Cited


Facebook. (n.d.). Meta. Retrieved from About Facebook.com Meta: https://about.facebook.com/meta/

Kocdar, B. A. (2020, Novermber 23). Wiley Online Library. Retrieved from Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 29(4), 931-949: https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.22367

ResearchGate. (n.d.). ResearchGate. Retrieved from Anadolu University Department of Distance Education: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Serpil-Kocdar

ResearchGate. (n.d.). ResearchGate. Retrieved from Anadolu University Department of Distance Education: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aras-Bozkurt

ResearchGate. (n.d.). ResearchGate. Retrieved from Yasar University New Media and Communication: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tuelay-Goerue-Dogan-2

 

 

 

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