ARM Moves to Fill Industry's Engineering Education Gap

By Richard Quinnell, EETimes, Oct. 19, 2016 – SEATTLE - As the culmination of several years' collaboration with educational institutions and industrial partners, ARM has launched ARM Educational Media, a subscription-based digital content hub offering interactive online courses and electronic textbooks. The content will initially be open to organizations to offer their students and employees, and will become available to individual learners in early 2017. The goal, according to ARM's chief technology officer Mike Muller, is to help close the knowledge gap between industry needs and what traditional engineering education teaches its students.

"Technology is moving at a fast pace," ARM's director of education and research enablement Khaled Benkrid told EE Times in an interview, "and at universities the emphasis is on research, not teaching. The result is a growing gap between what's taught and what industry needs." Benkrid gave as an example that many schools are teaching embedded systems development using 8-bit devices such as the 8051, leaving recent graduates scrambling to tackle work projects involving connected 32-bit processors.

To help address such shortfalls, Benkrid said, ARM as spent the last three years working with universities, governments, and industry to identify and develop academically rigorous programs of study that can be used to develop industry-critical skills. The courses are multimedia-rich, self-paced, and include hands-on laboratory exercises and knowledge testing, following a hands-on, learning-outcome-driven approach. Courses comprise ten or more modules, each module requiring four to five hours of study for completion. Laboratory exercises culminate by the end of study into full system-level designs. "We want the students to understand underlying principles," Benkrid said, "not just get something to work."

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