Engineering better teachers

A shared passion for reinvigorating engineering education will help drive Professor Ian Cameron and Associate Professor Roger Hadgraft as they take up their roles as Australian Learning and Teaching Council discipline scholars in engineering and technology.

The two will not only engage the wider engineering and technology communities, but also collaborate with other discipline scholars from business and the arts on cross-disciplinary issues.

Cameron, a professor in chemical engineering at the University of Queensland, went into academe after a decade in industry. He has since combined extensive ARC and industry research with teaching and learning innovations, particularly around curriculum developments to generate integrated courses that strongly emphasise systems perspectives in engineering.

As a teacher, Cameron says he is committed to providing authentic learning experiences for students through industry-sourced projects.

Hadgraft is director of the Engineering Learning Unit at the University of Melbourne. His interest in problem-based learning in engineering began in 1990 while at Monash, where it led to the development of such a curriculum in civil engineering from 1998.

Later at RMIT, problem-based learning was taken up in civil, environmental and chemical engineering between 2002 and 2006. In 2007, he moved to Melbourne to lead the Engineering Learning Unit and to work on project-based opportunities associated with the new Melbourne Model. Recent developments include designing transdisciplinary subjects and an e-portfolio for students to document their learning outcomes.

Outlining the major issues facing engineering education, Cameron points to the six recommendations contained in the 2008 review ‘Addressing the supply and quality of engineering graduates for the new century’. In the report, Emeritus Professor Robin King said engineering education needed enhanced public understanding; clarification of educational outcomes and standards; development of best-practice models; more women studying it; better staffing and resources; and stronger collaborative links with industry.

The recommendations were formally adopted by the Australian Council of Engineering Deans in April last year.

Demographics

One of the major challenges is the rapidly changing demographics of the engineering academic workforce, says Cameron. Over the past 25 years there has been a rapid increase in the proportion of academic staff with little direct experience of professional life outside academe.

As discipline scholars, Cameron and Hadgraft will capture a snapshot of the engineering academic community to better understand the current profile and the key attitudes that characterise teaching, learning and the nexus to research. This work will be done in consultation with internationally recognised demographer Professor Graeme Hugo from the University of Adelaide.

Industry engagement

The recent discipline-based initiative in engineering, conducted by the Australian Council of Engineering Deans, Engineers Australia and the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, identified the need for increased engagement between education and industry. Cameron and Hadgraft will focus efforts on this issue, particularly elucidating opportunities and identifying exemplars in academe-industry engagements across the Australian and international scene.

The aim is to encourage and facilitate mutually beneficial engagement with industry. Looking for innovative ways of exercising the theory-practice nexus and facilitating sectoral adoption is just one potential outcome.

Shared use of resources

Hadgraft believes that there is a big opportunity for shared learning resources for the teaching of engineering. While excellent repositories of learning materials exist, such as MERLOT and Engineering Pathway, they are underutilised, he says.

“In fact, many Australian academics are loath to even prescribe a textbook for their course,” Hadgraft says.

Consequently, academics spend much time preparing subjects from scratch rather than using well-developed existing materials. Contrast this with the standard practice of engineering or technology, which is to use common, industry-standard software to perform computations.

Hadgraft says that he and Cameron will work to ensure that all teachers can quickly find these resources. A list of reference sites is becoming available at http://aaee-scholar.pbworks.com and is also available on the ALTC Exchange.

A related project the two discipline scholars are working on is the definition of an engineering education body of knowledge (the EEBOK), a concept familiar to project managers, who use the PMBOK. The EEBOK will define fundamental understandings of key ideas in engineering education.

It will be distributed to all new engineering teachers as a core document, and will reinforce the need to focus on the development of engineering capability – the graduate attributes defined by Engineers Australia. It will include discussion of how students learn, how to define programs and subjects, and how to align learning objectives, activities, resources, assessment and feedback. It will also include best practice suggestions for the teaching of engineering subjects. The EEBOK will continue to grow and to be developed online by the engineering education community.

Meanwhile, the president of the Australian Council of Engineering Deans, Professor Peter Dowd, has welcomed the Australian Learning and Teaching Council discipline support strategy.

The ALTC is funding national discipline bodies to implement a strategy to support sustainable improvement in learning and teaching in the disciplines with engineering and teaching one of the first to receive financial support.

Dowd said the program in engineering and technology will assist dissemination of the outcomes of past and ongoing ALTC projects, as well as the work of discipline scholars, Cameron and Hadgraft.

Dowd says the planned forums and workshops will promote formation of new collaborations between ACED members to address emerging issues.

Go to www.altc.edu.au