For more than 70 years, accreditation has provided quality control for engineering education in the United States, seeking to assure that graduates of accredited programs are prepared for professional practice. However, by the 1980s, the accreditation criteria had become increasingly prescriptive, inhibiting development of innovative programs to reflect changing needs of practice. In response, ABET (formerly Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) and its stakeholders developed revised criteria, Engineering Criteria 2000 (EC2000), which emphasize learning outcomes, assessment, and continuous improvement rather than detailed curricular specifications. These criteria, together with international agreements among engineering accrediting bodies, facilitate mobility of an increasingly global profession. To assess the utility of the new criteria, ABET has commissioned a multiyear study of the impact of EC2000 on U.S. engineering education. Initial results from the study are encouraging and, as more results emerge, should support continuous improvement of the accreditation process, itself.

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As distance learning programs become more prevalent and as we begin to offer undergraduate engineering programs in a distance format, the question of laboratories and their role in engineering education becomes increasingly important. There is an ongoing debate about whether a remote laboratory experience can really accomplish the goals of educational laboratories. This leads, then, to the question of what are the true goals of a laboratory experience. This question has been addressed before, but not extensively in the context of distance education or with regard to the massive computing power that now enables highly sophisticated simulations. In January 2002, ABET, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, held a colloquy to explore this issue. This paper reports the preliminary conclusions of that colloquy.

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