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Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful tool for technological progress with profound impacts on governments, industries, universities, and societies. In Southeast Asia, AI has presented both opportunities and challenges. Local governments are increasingly experimenting and piloting AI technology to create smart, sustainable, and inclusive cities. Nevertheless, the adoption of artificial intelligence in cities requires proper planning, management, and implementation. Consequently, there is a need for a concerted effort to establish collaboration between industries, governments, academics, and societies in Southeast Asia. This policy brief aims to provide an overview of how artificial intelligence can be implemented to enhance urban mobility in Southeast Asia. To maximize the relevance of the policy brief, experts from various fields have been consulted in its preparation.

In recent years, there has been a fundamental shift in engineering education from an emphasis on covering content to a student-centric focus on ensuring the attainment of learning outcomes. To ensure attainment of the educational objectives, engineering education thought leaders have highlighted the importance of the development of effective authentic assessment schemes appropriate for the 21st century, and the alignment of assessment and instructional efforts with the planned learning objectives and outcomes. Our focus in this paper is on the use of formative assessment (also called assessment for learning) for engineering education. With formative assessment, an assessment is made of the current learning level and then pertinent feedback is provided to both the student and to the instructor so that they can take concrete steps to facilitate learning improvement. This is in contrast with the ubiquitous summative feedback (assessment ``of'' learning)---in which the main aim is to grade or rank the student by ascertaining their current learning level without really giving them concrete advice on what to do next to improve learning performance. The use of formative assessment can transform students' performance by empowering them with particularly potent ``self-assessment’’ skills through which students become more aware of their learning and know what is it that they should do next (i.e., they become ``self-directed”.) Formative assessment is equally useful for the teaching staff—by helping them know their impact and tailor the instructional strategy and try to personalize their pedagogy to the individual needs of the students. The main contributions of our paper are that we review the rich literature on formative assessment and effective feedback and synthesize insights that are relevant for engineering education.

In this research paper, we present—as a geographically dispersed set of academics working in nine different countries: namely, Pakistan, United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, United States of America, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Qatar, China, and Malaysia—a global international perspective on Outcome-based Education (OBE) accreditation standards, practices, and attitudes. The OBE paradigm is now the underlying paradigm followed by global accreditation efforts such as the Washington Accord (ratified in 1989). The shift to OBE is so pronounced that some education experts identify the shift to OBE and accreditation as one of the top 5 major changes of the last 100 years. Although OBE is often criticized for straitjacketing education, and resisted by hesitant faculty members suspecting additional burden, studies show that the OBE movement, on the whole, has helped in improving the educational standards and outcomes by ensuring proper planning of curriculum and assessment and their alignment with the program objectives and desired outcomes. OBE is also flexible in the sense that it does not dictate the choice of specific education strategies or teaching methods—it only says what should be the outcome. New OBE schemes have also diversified in response to early misgivings about OBE (related to excessive paperwork, and bean-counting-like auditing) and now admit diverse types of evidence (including qualitative and quantitative, formative and summative, formal and informal assessments). The aim of this work is to present a synthesis of the experiences of an international set of authors and the sharing of the global best practices in the field related to accreditation and assessment. An extensive internal survey was conducted to collect data from these international academics. After processing the data, we have organized our analysis as a discussion on a range of accreditation stages and artifacts including vision/mission statements, program objectives and outcomes, curriculum planning, educational assessment strategies, common pitfalls, and iterative continuous improvement. This paper will be a helpful starting guide for faculty members new to OBE, while also offering a broader perspective to experienced faculty members and administrators.

As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, the 2020s, the unprecedented rate of technological disruption and the short-lived nature of the specifics of engineering state-of-the-art require us to carefully evaluate what it takes to be an effective engineer and what this entails for engineering education and their lifelong learning. While it is true that certain basics of engineering will not change, there will be an increased premium for some skills (such as lifelong learning, meta-learning, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, communication skills, and cultural/global literacy). 21st-century skills are, as such, timeless skills: it is paradoxically the volatile nature of the modern world that has forced us from ephemeral vocational fads back to these permanently valuable skills. In this full research-to-practice paper, after reporting on the skills that policy think tanks and thought leaders deem necessary for the 21st century, we provide a synthesis in which we describe the pulls and pushes that learners and educators will face in the turbulent times of 2020 and beyond, and how they can thrive in the uncertain future through holistic well-rounded engineering education.