Dr. Çetiner’s Blogs (Prof. Dr. Gültekin Çetiner)

IIUM Elearning Courses
The unofficial IIUM Elearning site (maintained personally) has been used actively since last year. The number of students at the site approaches to 500 which nearly makes 1 out 5 in Kulliyyah of Engineering at IIUM. Since the site has no connection to the online IIUM students‘ Database at IIUM, the student records have to be initiated by students and confirmed and later maintained by us. Despite the difficulties and the involvement needed to survive on internet I would suggest the elearning staff to all my colleagues who would like to set an elearning site for their courses. Just go to Open Source ELearning System, Moodle’s site from here and download the latest software. It is very easy to maintain. You need PHP and MySQL at your webserver. Unfortunately, I could not setup the elearning system inside my personal site at IIUM due to lack of space and some unsupported libraries and functions.

Some keypoints of Engineering Management Topics that we learnt in the first week are:

1. We had a seminar on online activities. We have covered many things for online activities in this session
2. A proper description of Engineering (old definition and modified ABET definition)
3. Identifying engineering as a profession and not an art
4. Description of Management
5. Description of Engineering Management
6. Some important facts about engineers and managers
7. Definition of Systems as a whole
8. Definition of Engineering Systems
9. Definition of Management Systems
10. Description of 9 elements of a system namely inputs, outputs, interfaces, constraints, boundary, goal of system (common output), components (subsystems), interralations, and environment
11. System analyst approach to engineering problems
12. 3 system errors namely a) Goal Displacement b) Functional Distortion c) Functional Distraction
13. 3 Management Levels (1st level, midlevel and top level management) their titles and roles
14. Skills required for different management levels (interpersonal skills, technical skills and conceptual or analytical skills)
15. Skills needed by different level of managers
16. Difference between effectiveness and efficiency
17. Difference between leader and manager
18. Clarifying ‘doing the right things’ and ‘doing the things right’ with regard to leader and manager
19. Managers’ roles to be played at different levels: Interpersonal roles (figurehead role, leadership role, and liaison role), Informational roles (Monitoring role, Disseminator role, and Spokesman role), and finally most important roles namely Decisional roles (entrepreneurial role, negotiator role, resource allocator role, and disturbance handling role)
20. Now we have to take Course Entry Exam (which will be closed within week)
21. We have also Quiz (Introduction to Engineering Management), Forum 1: Introduction to Management (Graded), and Engineering Management Puzzle opened starting from this week.

I hope it will be helpful.

Engineering Management Course for Spring 2007 has started. As a feedback from the previous semester students, we have planned, with my dear colleague Engineer Halawani, an introduction session for the online activities.

The Engineering Management Course is supported by active e-learning activities. Actually the 35 percent of results in grading will be from online activities. Therefore, you should learn how to use the system effectively and efficiently.

The session for introducing the online system will be announced soon..

Please stay in touch.