Capabilities-driven curriculum design for hydrogen and fuel cell technologies

Fuel cells, one of the most promising devices which may replace the traditional fossil fuels, have emerged during the past decade as one of the possible solutions for resolving the severe pollution, global warming and possible future shortages of fossil fuels. Albeit important, hydrogen and fuel cell education was not bewared. Further, albeit new employment opportunities are opening up for graduates with solid background of fuel cell engineering, very few scholars tried to develop curriculum for future fuel cell engineers. Apparently, a design of the curriculum in the related field of the fuel cell engineering will be very helpful for the engineering students' capability expansions and future job seeking. By introducing the concepts of capability-driven curriculum design, a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) framework consisting of the modified Delphi method as well as the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) was defined. Fuel cell experts from the academic and research institutes were invited for providing opinions in capability derivations and curriculum design. Based on the experts' opinions, capabilities including understanding of the characteristics of various batteries, understanding of the evolution and theories of batteries, etc. were recognized by the experts as the essential capabilities. Meanwhile, theory and design of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell, materials and devices of the proton exchange membrane fuel cell, fuel cell system design and applications, etc. were selected as the components of the curriculum for developing the capabilities of a future fuel cell engineer.