Work in progress - A system-of-systems approach to teaching product lifecycle management (PLM)

This paper presents an alternative approach to educate engineering students for global competency by adopting a system-of-systems approach. A collaborative teaching project is taking place in Spring Semester 2009 between three institutions: Syracuse University in USA, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia in Spain, and Tecnológico de Monterrey in México. A unique feature of this project is that it not only provides an environment where students experience cross-cultural and communication issues, but also utilizes each institution's specific technical strengths and facilities while maintaining existing structure of individual courses. Students participate in a semester-long project on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) in one of two ways: (i) as a member of international team throughout the duration of the project, or (ii) by subcontracting certain tasks of their projects to other universities. The teaching project will also examine various issues such as merits as well as difficulties or challenges of the presented approach. Also, under way are comparisons of learning outcomes between students who are participating in the international collaboration projects and students who are not.