Subjects concerned with the teaching of basic statics and mechanics at tertiary level institutions have seen a progressive decrease, and in some cases, the total elimination of "hands on opportunities" for students to perform experimental work in support of material presented in the lectures and in tutorials.
The principal reasons offered for this trend is a blend of one or more of the following inter-related circumstances:
1. Increasingly large class sizes making it difficult to timetable and resource such activities
2. Competition for dedicated shared laboratory space from research needs
3. The commercially available teaching apparatus from the major vendors remains expensive
4. The availability/development of cheaper technology that "simulates" experimentation experience through videos and animation
The author has had 40 years involvement with the teaching of such material and has witnessed this progressive trend to the point where he has seen its effects on a large number of students as being nothing short of detrimental to their effective learning and better understanding of this material.
The pendulum has swung too far away from "hands-on" opportunities for performing experimentation by students in support of inferior learning mechanisms. Technology itself must come to the rescue to swing back the pendulum to "hands on" resource-affordable experimentation opportunities to students thus improving their engagement and interest in this style of material and bringing back the fun in their learning experience.
Design and the application of the design process is a fundamental learning objective that all engineering students must demonstrate during their undergraduate engineering education. Engineers Australia’s Stage 1 Competency Standards make explicit mention of design and the design process in two of the sixteen mandatory ‘Elements of Competency’ (Items 1.5 & 2.3).
At Flinders University engineering students are taught and exposed to design during every year of their undergraduate education. ‘ENGR1711 Engineering Design’ is part of the common first year and introduces students to an engineering design process coupled with hand drawing/Computer Aided Drawing (CAD) laboratories and a semester long group Design Challenge. The topic is structured such that theoretical learning is coupled with active, assessed tutorials that complement the material required for the Challenge. Student groups are encouraged to prototype their solution to a given design problem as part of the Challenge.
In 2013 a Flinders University ‘Embedding Transition Pedagogy Principles Across the First Year Curriculum’ internal competitive grants program was initiated, offering $4000 to topic coordinators who could demonstrate how one or more of the six curriculum principles could be embedded into their first year topic. The Topic Coordinator and lead author was successful in securing a grant to purchase a 3D printer and to develop educational resources (a 3D Printing Handbook and a 50-minute lecture) to support its use, to target the principles of ‘transition’, ‘curriculum design’ and ‘engagement’. The 3D printer and accompanying resources were used in Semester 1 of 2014 for the first time.
The competing and often conflicting time demand on today’s university students have necessitated the development and implementation of flexible learning strategies. This has resulted in some institutions resorting to complete removal of face-to-face teaching, in favour of curriculums that are 100% online. While such learning and teaching design may be suitable for some specific courses or purposes, this approach is generally not suitable for most undergraduate university courses. An alternative is to replace traditional approaches with a considered blend of face-to-face and technology supported methods. Termed as blended learning (BL), the method uses face-to-face interaction assisted by self directed study, work placements, projects, and structured online activities using an appropriate learning management system.
As a part of its BL strategy, the University of Western Sydney (UWS) distributed 11,000 iPads to all incoming students and staff in 2013. The iPad initiative was one of the curriculum renewal strategies to incorporate more flexible study options by engaging students in new ways of learning and interacting within and outside the classroom through use of new technology. The challenge then was to generate learning materials that can take full advantage of this emerging technology. A team of Blended Learning Advisors, Designers and E-learning (BLADE) specialists were appointed and embedded within each School to address this issue. Two BL advisors and three BL designers were placed within the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics (SCEM) in 2013.
Students entering tertiary institutions are often not well prepared mathematically for tertiary study. In addition, many students attempt to learn engineering mathematics by rote and never fully understand the mathematical concepts required in engineering studies. An approach to the teaching of mathematics is needed so that students can learn complex mathematical concepts with more understanding, i.e. achieve an "aha" moment with complex mathematical concepts.
Green Electric Energy Park (GEEP) is a custom-designed state of the art laboratory for teaching and research commissioned in 2013. Along with the new technical capabilities introduced by new facilities, there was a need and an opportunity to redesign the entire process of conducting laboratory classes at GEEP. Due to the unique design of the laboratory much of the challenges were to be addressed in a novel approach however there are many valuable experiences to be shared with academics in all engineering disciplines.
Most higher education institutions use online flexible learning management system that supports the online delivery and administration of resources, communication, collaboration and assessment. One of the main objectives of online delivery of a face-to-face unit is to embed iLecture in the learning management system. The iLectures contain the audio and the PowerPoint which enable students to learn in a mobile environment and combine working part-time with university study. But the traditional iLectures do not capture any physical demonstration of lecturer and thus students face difficulties in revision. A tablet or document camera may be used to capture the hand-writing demonstration (Derting and Cox, 2008) but it looses the PowerPoint. This causes another problem of having only one in the screen while both are needed at the same time for better demonstration of the engineering concepts. In order to solve these issues, an auto-tracking camera may be used in the lecture theatre that captures white board demonstration and at the same time it embeds with the PowerPoint in iLecture. It has been reported that many students found recorded lectures as a useful learning tool because they can use it to catch up the missed lectures and also as a revision tool for exams and assessments (Karnad, 2013).
In designing a coherent engineering program, we must recognise the changing student demographics. The current gen-y student cohort are particularly responsive to a number of pedagogical approaches which work most effectively. In addition, the motive behind university education are less academically driven, but rather employability. In order to provide a valuable and relevant education experience for the Gen-Y cohort we must recognise the changing expectation of university education (for the students) and how we can best deliver the required education for their needs. Herein, we will comment on the approaches we have used in framing the development of these expectation in our first year engineering course at Macquarie University.
Numerous studies have found that student attention span during most lectures is roughly fifteen minutes and after this period, the number of students paying attention begins to drop off dramatically. This drop-off results in a retention loss of lecture material and can negatively impact learning outcomes. Nevertheless, the traditional didactic lecture is still seen as an efficient, but not necessarily effective, means of teaching large numbers of students. Learners, however, are “constructors of knowledge” in a variety of forms. In particular, they take an active role in forming new understandings and are not just passive receptors. The concept of active learning appeals to this activity in forming new understandings and is generally defined as any instructional method that engages students in the learning process. Traditionally styled didactic lectures may offer little in the way of active learning opportunities due to their physical environment and/or content delivery pressures. The popularity of internet resources such as Youtube and the Kahn academy has shown that readily accessible, short online videos are a valuable resource that can be used to deliver core subject material with the benefit of freeing up the lecture classes to become active learning environments. The ‘flipped’ or ‘inverted’ classroom approach attempts to bring the effectiveness of active learning to the lecture venue by shifting the onus onto students to study the relevant material, which would ordinarily be covered in lectures, at home and in their own time.
New technologies offer tremendous power to assist with design and change in higher education curricula (Henson, 2010, Lai, 2012). Online educational resources have become increasingly common in recent years, as evidenced by their use in distance education and blended learning courses. In particular, one of the latest trends to appear online is the mass creation of online expository videos, including how-to, tutorial, and lecture videos (Carter et al., 2014). As the result, the large number of free educational videos has become available on the internet. However, several previous studies (Majid et al., 2012) together with our observations found that without necessary skills to search, locate, process, evaluate and use information students often experience various information related problems, such as information overload, inability to find the needed information and to extract the important points. Also it has been demonstrated that only a minority of YouTube videos related to the particular topic are useful for teaching due to misleading content and pour quality (Yaylaci et al., 2014, Raikos and Waidyasekara, 2014, Fischer et al., 2013). Students studding engineering generally encouraged taking initiative in problem solving and for students to learn most effectively, they need to feel involved and engaged in the learning process. This is difficult to achieve whilst delivering generic lecture content to large cohorts and during very limited tutorial sessions. With new technologies, however, it has now become possible for educators to self-create high quality online teaching-learning contents (Bae and Lee, 2015).
‘signals and systems’, ’digital signal processing’ and ‘random signal processing’ are three important courses for electrical engineering bachelor degree students. These courses have similar features which are both strong theoretical and practical. The contents of them are tightly related each other. Main problems students in their learning process are that they feel very difficult and boring to learn with traditional teaching approach because they can not understand the meaning of some mathematical concepts and properties, such as the concept of spectrum, system group delay and so on. These problems induce them concentrate their efforts only on calculations with mathematical formula. They don’t know how to analyse and solve the problems in real world. This results in engaging a low level of learning as students gain knowledge from lecture and memorize facts and procedures in order to pass exams._x000D_ Project-based Learning(PBL) is a self-directed mode of course delivery and students gain knowledge of the course material through designing, investigating and decision making at each step of the project. It’s main advantages is that it can improve the understanding of basic concepts, to stimulate the students’ self-learning ,to encourage deep and creative learning, and to develop team work and communication skills. It is gained world-wide interest as one of instructional method and welcomed by students. Based on ProjBL and aiming at the problems encountered in teaching process of three courses, a comprehensive innovation and practice in teaching and learning is presented in this paper based on project.
This paper describes the framework for embedding work integrated learning across the engineering curriculum in the context of employability within a dedicated stream of project units (design and/or professional practice). This was motivated by the rapidly changing work environment globally and the need to assure and evidence not only student achievement but student confidence and ability to self-reflect, adapt and transfer their learning across the curriculum. Employability gives particular coherence to the integration, connection and reflection on these developments by students, academics and industry project supervisors. Employability is a focus across the higher education sector, nationally and internationally, including the ability to apply knowledge in context, self-awareness, self-efficacy beliefs, and the ability to reflect prior and post action, and to adapt accordingly (Yorke & Knight, 2006; Scott, Coates, & Anderson, 2008). Our paper makes use of important prior work by Oliver (2010) in relation to ‘Benchmarking partnerships for graduate employability’, and Franz (2008), Billett (2011) and others on models and activities to support work integrated learning and employability skills effectively across a program.
While our focus in the paper is the designated stream of project units across each major of the program, Oliver has provided guiding questions for explicit identification of student capabilities, WIL experiences and evidence of learning that are guiding our development process in linking units, assessments and tools for ongoing student reflection and assurance of learning across the program.
Dr Horan led the design and development of the CAVE and Virtual Reality Facility within the Centre for Advanced Design and Engineering Training (CADET) at Deakin University. Ben is leading the CADET VR Lab and the Head of Discipline for Mechatronics within the School of Engineering... Read More →
Monday December 7, 2015 3:20pm - 3:30pm AEDT
Winkipop Room
Problem solving is one of the key skills engineers are required to have (Engineers Australia, 2011). Idea generation is a key step involved in the engineering problem solving process (Belski, 2002). Despite this, it has been reported that the engineering curricula of many institutions do not provide clear nor sufficient instruction on the process and techniques used during idea generation and consequently students do not do it well (Daly, Mosyjowski, & Seifert, 2014; Samuel & Jablokow, 2010). Engineering students are known to be prolific users of digital technologies (Johri et al., 2014), but is not known to what extent students utilise electronic and paper based materials while studying. If students significantly utilise electronic based materials more than paper based materials, it may be viable to teach idea generation techniques via the use of web-based tools, potentially meaning these skills may be taught without utilisation of class time. If this approach is to be adopted, it is important to first determine that the quality of education would not decrease. In this case, choice of methodology is important. It has been reported that the eight fields of MATCEMIB (Mechanical, Acoustic, Thermal, Chemical, Electric, Magnetic, Intermolecular, Biological), which are used as hints in the Substance-Field Analysis problem solving methodology, is an effective idea generation technique which can be quickly taught to students (Belski et al., 2014). It may therefore be appropriate to implement a version of Substance-Field Analysis as a web based tool to make it available for engineering students to utilise.
The 'Calculus for Kids' program is a research project conducted through the University of Tasmania and Australian Maritime College. The project was created to provide primary school students with an application based understanding of engineering mathematics, through ICT, and ultimately encourage students into the field of engineering.
Hounsell, Entwhistle, Marton, and Biggs [2005 & 1999] argue that students will approach their learning differently depending on the pedagogical models that their lecturers use. Lecturers who rely on one-way communication in lectures and tutorials, and test for declarative knowledge in end-of-course, closed-book exams tend to encourage students to take a surface or passive approach to learning. Those who require their students to interact in lectures and tutorials and problem solving projects, and who test students’ deep understanding of the topic via exercises, quizzes and continuous and authentic assessment tasks, help instil a deep or active approach to learning. There are many ways to encourage a deep approach to learning. In a featured article in the International HETL Review in 2014, Estes, Ingram and Liu, summarized and critiqued the practice and research literature that underpins one of them, namely, an emerging pedagogical model called ‘the flipped classroom’. In the 2014 AEEE conference the second author presented a first cycle of action research that studied an example of ‘flipping the classroom’ in Engineering Education. This paper reports on a second cycle of that research._x000D_ _x000D_ Biggs, J. (1999) Teaching for Quality Learning at University (pp. 165-203). Buckingham, UK: SRHE and Open University Press. _x000D_ Marton, F., Hounsell, D. and Entwistle, N. (2005). The Experience of Learning: Implications for teaching and studying in higher education. 3rd (Internet) edition Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, CTLA. _x000D_ Estes, M., Ingram, R., & Liu, J. (2014) ‘A Review of Flipped Classroom Research, Practice, and Technologies’. IHETLR, Volume 4._x000D_ _x000D_
Existing literature suggests that good feedback in educational contexts can significantly improve learning processes and outcomes, if delivered in an effective way (Duncan-Howell & Lee 2007; Narciss & Huth, 2004). Yet, providing effective feedback has always been a challenge for academics. Furthermore, with the growing use of tablets like iPads and similar mobile devices, students are increasingly becoming ‘on the go’ learners or mobile learners. To this effect, mobile learning (m-learning) has become important in universities and is considered as an extension to the more traditional e-learning environments for enhancing teaching and student learning, communication efficacy, portability and the convenience of using it (Cox & Marshall 2007; Sharples 2003; Hwanga & Chang 2011). Nevertheless, there is a lack of standard set of applications or tools to support such mobile teaching and learning in e-learning environments (Lalita 2011), especially in assessing and providing timely and effective feedback.
Research suggest that Project Based Learning (PBL) is an effective, integrative teaching methodology that engages students in their learning in both curricular and generic behavioural and contextual competencies (Wurdinger & Qureshi, 2015; Rios-Carmenado et al., 2015; Chua et al., 2014; Spalek, 2014, Tseng et al., 2013). In this research we will investigate the application of PBL in two different modes of study offered for the same subject.
Engineering students learning their very first foundational concepts require close integration of analytical skills and rigorous hands-on experience and this is recognised in most current courses, however student and staff feedback at UNSW indicates there is considerable scope for improvement. Specifically, some issues that may be improved include (i) variability in laboratory demonstrator expertise and communication skills, which are not always tailored to students’ levels of knowledge, (ii) the possibility of re-visiting laboratory guidance, particularly fundamental concepts and instructions, and (iii) opportunities for self-directed learning. From a staff perspective, there is inefficiency (demonstrators answer same question many times), a lack of narrative explaining the close integration between theory and lab, which is a problem identified by student feedback as well, and no opportunity for linking on-campus with off-campus laboratory experiences. Many sources point to the benefits of completing preparation before each laboratory (Gregory and Di Tripani, 2012), and the challenges of the high-cognitive-load live laboratory environment, in which students attempt in short periods of time to construct new schema that bridge their analytical and practical understanding of course content (Schmid and Yeung, 2005). Patterson’s (2011) evaluation of a chemical engineering-based video laboratory manual showed that students universally found it a positive resource, preferable to a paper-based manual. Although there is significant engineering literature discussing remotely-operated laboratories (e.g. Almarshoud, 2011), there is remarkably little on self-paced video laboratory guidance (Schmid and Yeung, 2005; Dongre et al., 2013), and none describe details of how such materials should be prepared.
Videoconferencing software is gaining increased prominence in provision of teaching and learning opportunities to students in communities that are remote from teachers. Various situations where videoconferencing may be used include the provision of education to students in geographically remote locations such as indigenous communities, provision of education to groups of students where sufficient numbers are not present to justify a teacher, and bringing together international experts with extremely talented students or teachers. In some cases the interaction does not depend too much on the time delay or latency in transmissions between teacher and student, whereas in other cases latency causes significant challenges to pedagogy.
Teamwork is an integral component of any engineering degree, but students often have difficulty organising team meetings outside of class times due to discrepancies in their individual study timetables as well as their family and work commitments. Rich-media synchronous online technologies such as video/web conferencing and virtual worlds can be used to help address this problem by enabling anyplace, anytime interaction, while at the same time mirroring the communication modes students will encounter in their future workplaces. However, not much is known about how these technologies compare with one another for facilitating different types of collaborative learning task and in terms of their student-perceived affordances.
