A service science context in education driven by disruptive innovation and the Internet of Things

Global Engineering is the last frontier in education. It creates a dilemma of providing engineering education anywhere in the World, preserving local cultural values, and applying it anywhere around the Globe. A recent Singapore Declaration [ASEE Global Forum, 2009], and consecutive World Engineering Education Forums, [1] paved the roadmap towards Global Engineering calling for practical solutions to implement the vision of a global engineer. In response to these challenges, several 'disruptive innovation' [Christensen, 1995] solutions such as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Massive Open Online Laboratories (MOOL) have been introduced including the one based on the Internet of Things (IOT) and disruptive microelectronics [2]. Disruptive Microelectronics which includes embedded systems, Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), and (Programmable Systems On a Chip (PSOC), is one of excellent case studies of disruptive technologies (or disruptive innovation) which is defined as an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The Internet of Things is the next generation of the Internet connecting objects, not just people. Since the ultimate goal is to produce new industries globally, understanding, measuring, evaluating, and preserving the integrity of global engineering becomes fundamental. The latter is proposed to be addressed by Quality Assessment (QA) of emerging global engineering curricula and scholars involved in teaching of global engineering. For example, International Society for Engineering Education (IGIP) is one of the leaders providing international certification of scholars and one of the frontrunners in fostering engineering on line, critical for global engineering. The overall process of global engineering education addressing essential skills for engineers from any country to be competitive in an international market for engineering knowhow, with skills not longer limited to cultural sensitivity needed only for product design destined for diverse markets can be superbly captured by Service Science [Spohrer, 2008]. Service science is an interdisciplinary paradigm to the study, design, and implementation of complex systems in which specific arrangements of people and technologies take actions that provide value for others [3]. It is also a proposed academic discipline and research area that would complement multiplicity of disciplines that contribute to knowledge about service. The interdisciplinary nature of the field calls for a curriculum and competencies to advance the development and contribution of the field of service science using so called the T-Shape curricula as shown in Figure 1. The vertical bar in T represents the depth of knowledge a student is majoring in whereas the horizontal bar corresponds to the multidisciplinary knowledge gained by the student. The proposed IOT based curricula corresponds to the service science platform represented by a modified T-Shape diagram surrounded by the circle representing the IOT universe as depicted in Figure 2. The model solution of Online Engineering is motivated by: (1) the search for Cost Effective and 'Democratic' Online Engineering; (2) the definition of Global Engineering Solution. Furthermore, the approach is based on Disruptive Education, as defined by Christensen, and the underlying technology is derived from the Internet of Things defined as a Web of Objects (Rao, 2010). The Web of Objects (WOO) is a superset of the Internet of Things which enables, as stated above, worldwide interaction among objects without human intervention as well as the Internet, a classic medium facilitating communication among people. The presented Online Engineering platform, called WOO3