A Study of Maintenance-Related Education in Swedish Engineering Programs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for preparing this interesting manuscript. Overall, the topic is timely and may be of interest to the engineering education community. There were a couple of clarifying points that I believe would strengthen the manuscript. The first one is related to the study design. I was unclear how reliable and accurate the Swedish Council for Higher Education is. In other words, how often does this data bank get updated? This would help us identify the relevance of the work. I also recommend you include a figure or table caption indicating when you accessed this data source and the years covered in your analysis. I was also unclear how Figure 2 and 3 connected to the industrial realities surrounding the schools/universities explored. For example, some of the courses may be tailored to the regional need and industrial composition. Have you considered exploring this? I believe this would strengthen your arguments. Also, for Table 2, it would be helpful if you could categorize the presence of these courses by the levels (similar to what you did in Appendix A). A minor comment is to avoid starting a sentence with a number. This is found in Section 3. Results un the first line of the first paragraph.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable input. The comments have been used for improving the text in following way:

• Regarding the reliability and accuracy of the Swedish Council for Higher Education, a clarifying description of the engine and website has been added, see p. 8 lines 185-194. The site is seen as the most accurate and reliable source as it is directly related with the national admission system (in Sweden, the admission is centralized on national level).
• A recommendation was to include in the figure/table captions when data was accessed from the different sources (the website antagning.se and the university web pages). The data retrieval was made first during one week in June 2019 and thereafter under three weeks in September 2019. The kind of information is unlikely to change rapidly, so references to the respective moth of inquiry were added on p. 8 line 196 and p. 9 line 212. For clarification purposes, the program year/semester in focus was added to the figure caption of figure 2 and 3, see p. 8 lines 207-208 and p. 9 lines 210-211.
• The question regarding how figures 2 and 3 are connected to industrial realities surrounding the schools/universities is not fully connected with the main topic of this article but is an interesting area for further studies. However, it is to some extent related with the findings: It was found that the maintenance related courses often are tailored with respect to the specific program/subject area. Although the industrial realities to some degree direct the type of programs offered in a specific region, especially as the smaller universities mainly recruit locally/from the region, the impact is mainly seen on program level in terms of what programs to offer and sometimes also the curriculum content, but to lower extent on course level. A discussion regarding tailorized course content depending on subject area and a note on the programs with maintenance specialization and their correlation with regional and national industry needs was added on p. 15 lines 386-395.
• The level was added to Table 2, see p. 10-11 lines 288-289.
• Two sentences that started with a number have been adjusted (p. 1 lines 14-15 and p. 10 line 252). In addition, the language has undergone a review and has been corrected throughout the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

I found this a refreshingly straightforward and easy to follow contribution. Well done!

I would have liked to see (besides minor language changes, eg,. ECTS instead of credits, and some minor typos), some more discussion of benchmarking. Is the standard of maintenance engineers a fair comparison for all engineering graduates? I can see the benefits of using these standards to check what’s written into programme syllabi, but they give the impression that the situation is seriously lacking, which may be a bit misleading. Using the CDIO model, one would assume that maintenance is a given part under Operate, especially with Swedish engineering education’s strong emphasis on sustainability these days. However, could it be that sufficient knowledge is given in other ways, not explicitly mentioned in the course documents that for the basis for this investigation, perhaps when addressing sustainability concerns? Are there any indications from industry that graduates are lacking in this area? That would make the case stronger. Any international comparison of what’s actually being thought (as opposed to the literature asking for this) could also have functioned as another kind of benchmarking. Lacking this, and seeing as this is a draft for a general educational journal rather than one focused on engineering education, maintenance education or sustainability education, I would suggest the authors make the article more relevant to other fields of education by discussing the specific conditions for this research within engineering education (so as to point out what could well be repeated in other fields).

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable input. The comments have been used for improving the text in following way:

• It was recommended to use ECTS instead of credits. However, as a Swedish credit point is not the same as an ETCS credit according to the Bologna system, and the formal term used by the government is “credits”, the choice was to use the term “credits” throughout the manuscript (previously, both “credits” and “credit points” occurred in the text, and this has been corrected). An explanatory text regarding the difference between the Swedish system and ETCS was added on p. 7 lines 165-169.
• A discussion regarding the use of standards as theoretical basis, as well as the possibility that relevant content could possibly be found in other courses than those included in the study, was added in the discussion. First, the potential problem with using standards is addressed on p. 16 lines 422-445, including a discussion on the possibility of finding relevant content is other courses, alternatively that generic knowledge could be utilized in specific contexts. Secondly, a general implication on the use of industrial and other kind of standards was added on p. 17 lines 463-469. The comment regarding the strong emphasis on sustainability is quite relevant, several universities in Sweden has a sustainability focus, which also is seen in the engineering programs, for instance in the form of specific courses in sustainable development. However, as the focus is on maintenance and reliability, and extensive discussion regarding this was not included in the manuscript, more than a note on the emphasis on sustainability in general.
• Due to limited studies on the similar topic, a full benchmarking of the Swedish situation vs. the international situation is hard. Some comparison with previous studies is added to the discussion, see p. 16 lines 446-455 but most importantly, a suggestion of further research is given regarding international benchmarking, see p. 16 lines 455-456.
• As pointed out, general implications were missing in the manuscript, and therefore the discussion section ends with general conclusions regarding the use of curricula and course syllabi and standards for similar studies were added, see p. 17 lines 457-469.
• Language has undergone a review and has been corrected throughout the manuscript.