Enabling Industry skills in Automotive Embedded Systems Courses: A Collaborative Model

Automotive electronics and related software market is growing significantly and expected to gain high demand of skilled employees in the next decade. The market drivers being the customer preferences, government regulations, technology adoption and recent participants like autonomous and electric vehicle technologies. Hence, industries are showing lot of interest in collaborations with academia for technology innovations and for getting industry ready employees. This paper presents the experiences and outcomes of collaborations with automotive industries in automotive embedded systems courses like, Automotive electronics, AUTOSAR, Multicore core architecture and programming, and Human-Machine-Interface offered to the students of Electronics and Communication Engineering program at KLE Technological University. These courses involve core technical concepts, computing, and design of hardware/ software architecture. The traditional mode of teaching is found to be less effective and hence, innovative pedagogical techniques are used with the help of industries for teaching these courses. The techniques helped to enhance students’ ability to solve complex engineering problems and to build higher cognitive learning ability. The collaborative contributions from both industry experts and academic faculty in design and delivery of automotive embedded courses have resulted in building industry specific skills among students which in turn resulted into a greater number of in campus placements and reduction in on job training.