Engineering Programs and Social Sciences at Sultan Qaboos University: Presentation of Experience and Trends

The engineering programs at Sultan Qaboos University are designed to include a number of courses related to humanities and social sciences. This will enrich the interdisciplinarity required for engineering programs from both theoretical and practical aspects. This trend has become more significant after ABET accreditation of all College of Engineering programs in the last few years. However, like any new deployment of such interdisciplinarity, few challenges were encountered and a number of solutions successfully adopted. This fact is natural for engineering disciplines that have strong ties with rapidly evolving industrial environments. The currently growing interaction between engineering and social sciences will certainly result in the emergence of new fields in educational programs and scientific research that will strongly serve the modern society. Within this spirit, the paper will present and discuss a number of interdisciplinary models that are part of SQU engineering programs, emerging in a similar trend as in most engineering programs in renowned universities. For instance, the final year project, which is a key element of the engineering curriculum, commonly linked to industry, requires constraints related to social, ethical, economical, health, environmental and political impacts on the final project outcome. The curricula of college of engineering contain six compulsory credits and six other elective credits related to humanities and social sciences that are selected from a list of more than 67 courses.