School of Engineering (ENG)

Engineering Education

People

Mr Manish Malik, Dr Djamel Azzi, Dr Giles Tewksbury, Dr Boris Gremont, Dr Ya Huang, Dr Rinat Khusainov, Mrs Lynsey Plockyn and Dr Nick Savage

Research Activities

Technology Enhanced Engineering Education

We conduct research in the innovative use of social media and other web tools by individual learners and academics. We received funding to look at the impact of providing video recordings of normal lectures to students. We have also received funding and published work involving the use of personal web tools, such as twitter, forums, wikis etc, in final year engineering project supervision. We received funding to release open educational resources, such as exam papers and have published work on the use of such resources in enhancing student experience and understanding. We also received funding to study the use of computer games based delivery engineering concepts to mechanical engineering students.

There has been a great frustration for Mathematics and Engineering academics, who would like to produce banks of questions however the manual processes involved are too time consuming and with complex maths can be too risky from the perspective of introducing mistakes or numerical errors into one or more questions in a large bank of questions. Some academics have moved away from Questionmark Perception towards Maple, which does allow such questions to be created. We produced and documented resources that may assist staff in the creation of numerical calculation questions in QM Perception. The extra work evaluated and documented some of the different approaches to producing mathematics question banks.

All students conducting project or research work are required to undergo an ethical review of their proposals. We created a web-based system that will guide students through the ethical approval procedure. The system will present students with feedback that is relevant and tailored to their project providing a better experience for students and improved learning opportunities.

Intelligent Learning Environments

We developed and evaluated an intelligent performance assessment system for a virtual electronic laboratory. Laboratory work is critical in undergraduate engineering courses. It is used to integrate theory and practice. This demands that laboratory activities are synchronized with lectures in order to maximize their derivable learning outcomes, which are measurable through assessment. The typical high costs of the traditional engineering laboratory, which often militate against the synchronization of laboratory activities and lectures, have catalyzed the increased adoption of virtual laboratories in engineering laboratory education.

The principles of assessment in the virtual learning environment are essentially the same as in the traditional learning environment, with the same requirements for fairness, reliability, and validity. This has motivated staff in the School of Engineering to research the implementation of a Virtual Electronic Laboratory (VEL) environment and the inclusion of a Bayesian network-based tool for the performance assessment of students' undertaking laboratory activities in the environment. The work has far reaching implications for the effective delivery of electronic engineering education in both resource constrained and means-rich teaching environments.

Open Educational Resources

New web technologies are driving a revolution, not just in the way students consume and institutions deliver higher education. At its heart is a move to make universities' educational materials, from seminar notes to podcasts and videos of lectures, available free online. Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been doing this for nearly a decade. Almost 80% of its courses are now available free from its ‘Opencourseware’ site. A very recent initiative from Stanford University includes not only study materials, but also scheduled online assessments allowing participating students to obtain achievement certificates at the end of the courses.

JISC and the Higher Education Academy funded pilot projects and activities in the UK around the open release of learning resources for free use and repurposing worldwide. Staff from the School of Engineering participated in a winning project consortium bringing together academics from five UK universities, coordinated by the HEA Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences. The project consortium has made available around 700 independent study elements in support of Computer Science and Engineering, encompassing complete lectures, reading lists, entire tutorial notes and comprehensive assessments and marking schemes from award bearing programmes of study. To suggest a pedagogical context for the adoption of any study element, hierarchical metadata tagging groups elements into overarching topical and thematic families and links to an exemplar module of study. The materials are now available on the JORUM web site.

More information can be found here: www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/oer

Likewise, the School of Engineering, along with six other Institutions from across the United Kingdom, was involved in another JISC/HEA funded OER project. Through this project staff in the 7 institutions released 360 credits worth of Engineering teaching material and resources as Open educational resources.

More information can be found here: www.engsc.ac.uk/oer

Problem Based Learning

Our research work focuses on the delivery, student experience, effective supervision and assessment of Group work and Project/Problem based learning (PBL) activities. Project/Problem based learning is widely used within engineering schools including ours. It provides students with the opportunity to work in teams and on projects that operate close to workplace settings. We have ran trials and published work on PBL/Group work activities where the engineer's log book was replaced by an online Google Document (GDoc) shared between the team mates and the tutor. We are also interested in investigating how to make PBL more effective and less resource intense.

Student Engagement and Motivation Studies

We conducted research to understand the motivational influences of students as they progress through HE and also as they progress from FE to HE. The motivational influences have been assessed using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The purpose of this is to align pedagogical interventions at University with students' motivation to increase the efficiency of teaching and assessment.

Students motivations in using past exam papers for revision are well know. We look at how we can use personal web tools and student motivations to enable peer support during exam revision period as well as deliver ‘just-in-time’ teaching.