Using TEALE learning methodology to promote portable interdisciplinary accountability in engineering education

Research suggests that an increase in learner mobility across formal and informal jurisdictions is a positive response to an integrated global economy and workforce. To facilitate ebbs and flows of maintaining a mobile global workforce, the literature suggests that engineering education should promote methodology and learning mechanisms that personalize accountability of mobile learners´ content knowledge across jurisdictions. In addition, data from the literature shows that mobile or cyber-learning is generating massive amounts of data which could inform engineering educators in their response to a mobile and constantly changing workforce. This paper reviews data from a pilot study of Technology-Enhanced Autonomous Learning Environment (TEALE). TEALE is a framework for mobile learning environments that afford accountability of personalized evidence-based content across learning jurisdictions. Prelimary data from this third pilot report suggests that TEALE promotes accountability of content knowledge across learning jurisdictions: both among formal disciplines in the academy, as well as between the academy, informal learning and workplace requirements. However, the data also suggests that seamless mobility across these academic and social jurisdictions involves issues far beyond technology. These issues, which include adjudicating relevance and value among academic cultures, incentives for motivation, authority and autonomy should be accounted for when using TEALE. Attention to these issues could prevent engineering educators from viewing potential opportunities for inter-jurisdictional collaborations as encroachments and avert the specter of unintended social-dramas.