In Science and Engineering, practical hands-on experience is known to have profound influences on student learning. However, our recent surveys and interviews show significant dissatisfaction among students regarding lack of facilities to gain practical skills.
In an environment of significant economic constraints, maintaining the quality of higher education is a major challenge. Our reviews indicate that reliance on traditional laboratories suffers from several drawbacks:
• Paucity of resources;
• Emergence of new process paradigms;
• Lack of insight into scaling;
• Lack of maintenance.
Our surveys uncovered that our University invests considerable resources towards the establishment and maintenance of its industry-scale utilities.
Thus, we designed a blue-print for adapting the following facilities, that support our School infrastructure, to develop valuable graduate attributes in engineering practice:
• a boiler system for distributed supply of steam;
• a cooling tower for supplying water in our laboratories;
• a compressor for supplying compressed air to our units.

These utilities are routinely maintained, are amenable for imparting practical experiences, and could be operated safely at variable scales. Our survey showed that the main resource requirements are:
• Instruments to measure process variables;
• A Control Panel to manipulate relevant process variables;
• Pedagogical tools to enable learning/teaching.
In the early days of implementing our innovative plan, we find that the impact is being felt not only within our School and the Faculty, but is also expected to provide valuable training for industry personnel employed with a range of industry partners in the future.