For decades Sudan, like most of Sub-Saharan African countries, has been facing profound engineering education issues, namely: poor funding, outdated curricula, ineffective teaching and learning methods, inadequate human capacity, poor research/publishing condition, inappropriate facilities, inadequate educational technology and ICT environment, weak university/industry relationship, lack of academic freedom, and missing of quality control and accreditation measures. The paper discussed these issues, and proposed solutions such as redesign of flexible curriculum, adopting learner-centered approach, and developing hiring structure that focuses on recruiting and retaining qualified educators, with the goal of graduating a high rate of qualified engineers, ready for the 21st century.

Currently, the researcher has been engaging in engineering education research in Sudan. Needless to say, the researcher has encountered many challenges while gathering data using semi-structured interview. This paper discusses these challenges, and how the researcher was able to successfully overcome most of them, and to achieve complete interview. These challenges evolve around factors that affecting the quality of gathered data: experienced participants, well-developed interview protocol, interview environment and logistics, interviewer’s experience and training, language of the interview, and transcription of recorded audio interviews to text. Researcher’s network and his professional connections enabled the researcher to assemble and approach a group of experienced participants who were willing to share their expertise related to the research topics. Also, researcher knowledge of both Arabic and English languages was instrumental in conducting quality Arabic interviews, transcription of audio interviews, and accurate translation between the two languages. At the same time researcher’s expertise and his upfront preparation helped in avoiding interview distraction and letting the participant to talk freely, while keep the participant focused on the research topics.