The petroleum education has been modified very little in the past 30 years and needs to change in the post-Google era to cater to the tech-savvy minds of the modern student. Although developments in technology have positively responded to the needs of the industry in the past, its future advancement will include areas such as telemetry, sensors and data handling, and analytics. Thus, a new approach to engineering education, involving the fundamentals of engineering sciences that culminates in the development of experiential learning on cyber/physical systems, is important.
This paper presents the urgent need for a new type of curriculum for petroleum engineering education that encompasses engineering, science, and technology.
There have been discussions in the recent past on the changes in petroleum engineering education, but consensus on the approaches to be taken has not be reached. As enrollment shrinks because of contraction in the industry, it is necessary to revisit and accelerate the change because it has become a technology-driven problem rather than a market-driven problem.
In the past, several reports and models have been proposed by different organizations, including the National Academy of Engineering, to change the engineering curricula.
