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This paper examines specific problems of educational practice that I, an undergraduate engineering educator and education researcher, have encountered in creating an interdisciplinary engineering project course. I reveal my process of theorising about problems of practice to position engineering educators' pedagogical theorising as worthy of scholarly focus. In a reflective scholarship of teaching and learning paradigm, I take the iterative design of this course as the object of inquiry, across semesters and institutional contexts. I discuss the iteration of five key dimensions of the course: (1) authenticity to engineering professional work, (2) promoting learning of teamwork skills, (3) complexities and equity dimensions of situated project-based learning environments, (4) valuing social sciences and social context reasoning for engineers, and (5) creating a responsive curriculum for students. I distil insights related to each of these dimensions. I conclude with a consideration of the interplay between these dimensions and a reflection on the form of scholarship for engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presented here is a novel engineering degree initiative established at Charles Sturt University (CSU), Australia. This program embodies emerging trends and prospects in engineering education, aspiring to nurture adept engineers well-prepared for practical application. Furthermore, this paper delves into the application of this program for training the next generation of water engineers, equipping them with indispensable skills to confront novel challenges. The CSU Engineering program incorporates several attributes commonly found in progressive engineering curricula. It places significance on work-based learning and encompasses an extensive 6000-hour industrial work placement. This emphasizes student self-reflection, engineering design, robust academic leadership, the integration of educational innovation and novel tools for scholastic exploration, and comprehensive student assessment. Gaining robust industry support, the CSU Engineering program garners recognition as an exemplar for future education. The adaptability, professionalism, responsibility, and leadership exhibited by CSU cadets are highly regarded by their industrial partners. Feedback highlights the consistent advancement of cadets' soft skills, spanning teamwork, communication, leadership, community engagement, and interpersonal relations. Notably, CSU cadets receive substantial remuneration from their industrial engagements. Despite the challenges posed by COVID-19 restrictions, the CSU Engineering program continues to operate seamlessly with minimal disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well documented that engineering practice is as much social as it is technical. Providing accurate course mapping and supporting teaching staff to scaffold engineering practice learning through whole of programme curriculum are key challenges. This study proposes a conceptual framework for engineering professional practice in an Australian context that is constructed through the triangulation of data collected from practitioner perspectives, literature, and reflection upon both authors' industry experiences. This employability skill development framework describes six key themes as graduate-level learning outcomes aligned to Australian accreditation requirements in a format that readily supports explicit inclusion of engineering professional practice in curriculum design. These key themes are illustrated along a continuum of personal, interpersonal, and contextual competencies and attitudes to communicate the interrelated nature of engineering employability skills. While this paper does not attempt to propose a universal framework, its potential broader relevance, future refinement, and evaluation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are increasingly used in manufacturing, transportation, health, and other industries. To develop these complex interdisciplinary systems, highly qualified CPS engineers are required who possess sound engineering knowledge and excellent transferable skills. Academic institutions offer a range of modules and curricula to teach CPS engineering. However, the literature reports a gap between expectations of industry and competencies of CPS graduates. To close this gap, this paper introduces and describes a holistic educational framework (T-CHAT) for teaching CPS engineering at the module level. To evaluate this framework, two use cases were analysed by conducting self-perception surveys and semi-structured interviews with students. Descriptive statistics and t-tests were calculated for the survey data. Interviews were coded and analysed using a General Inductive Approach. The analysis results were discussed by the comparison of the T-CHAT implementations in these two use cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Society is in strong need to change the way in which energy is produced and consumed. To cope with this complex challenge, integration of knowledge from different disciplines is needed. This paper shows how an interdisciplinary educational approach called networked learning combined with sustainability transition theories can help groups of engineering students to address pressing societal challenges such as the energy transition. A series of 8 workshops was held with an interdisciplinary engineering student team of a University of Technology. Networked learning within the student team showed an ad-hoc character, mainly caused by shifting student constellations during workshops. Workshops focusing on short-term goals resulted in more concrete output. The team showed a high level of equality amongst members and actively reflected on organisational aspects of their learning process. Sustainability transitions concepts and theories that integrate multiple disciplinary perspectives further supported the learning process and helped to guide strategic decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering accreditation bodies express a strong consensus that in addition to technical and scientific skills, engineering education also needs to promote the development of professional skills. In general, team-based projects are considered to be valuable approaches to develop such skills and have been extensively added to engineering curricula. Yet, it remains unclear which skills and to what extent students learn from these interventions. The challenge of assessing the development of those skills is an important factor in this gap. In this paper, we used a standardised self-reporting questionnaire to evaluate the development of students' self-efficacy beliefs through in-course and capstone projects. Results suggest that students only marginally develop these skills when they are not explicitly addressed as part of the project, showing ways to more effectively support student learning of professional skills. The questionnaire also proved to be an effective and scalable way to assess large classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engineering education has traditionally focused on the development of technical skills and knowledge. Nowadays, the need for educating engineers in non-technical skills, such as reflective thinking, is being recognised internationally. This paper proposes that socio-cultural impacts of technology be studied together with the technology itself through the integration of social awareness modules into advanced technical courses, providing a venue for students to exercise their reflective thinking skills in the context of technologies that are of interest to them. The paper presents an exploratory study of the essays of senior year engineering students on the socio-cultural impacts of computer vision technologies. It provides insights on the themes that are of interest to the students and on the students' strengths and weaknesses relating to their reflective thinking abilities. Similar modules would apply well to other advanced courses in the engineering curriculum, to help contextualise technology and enhance the reflective abilities of engineering graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a method to analyse the coherence of existing curricula at higher education institution. We focus our attention to engineering programmes at universities but the proposed method is by no means restricted to those cases. In contrast to other known methods, our approach is quantitative, decentralised, and asynchronous and allows to analyse entire programmes (in contrast to single courses) and does not depend on using specific teaching methods or tools. We propose to perform this quantitative assessment in two steps: first, representing the university programme as an opportune graph with courses and concepts as nodes and connections between courses and concepts as edges; second, analysing the structure of the programme using methods from graph theory. We thus perform two investigations, both leveraging a practical case – data collected from three engineering programmes at two Swedish universities: (a) how to represent university programmes in terms of graphs (here called concepts-courses graph (CCG)) and (b) how to reinterpret the most classical graph-theoretical node centrality indexes and connectivity and network flow results in order to analyse the programme structure, including to discover flows and mismatches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of engineering academics' perceptions of writing practices in the curriculum, and the extent to which these practices are visible to their students and to the academics. This paper draws on research from an ongoing study into the invisibility of writing practices in the engineering curriculum using a practice architectures lens. The paper uses examples from the sites of practice of two participants in the study to argue that prevailing practices in engineering education constrain more than enable the development and practice of writing in the engineering curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation and reuse of previous design solutions, or precedents, is central to design. This paper describes qualitative research conducted over three years at two institutions, aimed at investigating the role of design knowledge re-use in project-based mechanical design courses. Research data were collected through participant observation, student interviews, anonymous questionnaires, and website analytics. The paper identifies challenges that must be addressed in order to support novice engineers in rehearsing the types of knowledge required to successfully reason about and engage with design precedents. Two categories of design precedents are identified: concept precedents and detail precedents. Providing students with access to the latter is identified as a particular challenge, as is providing students with access to engineering communities of practice. Approaches to addressing these challenges are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction to Engineering is the first engineering course American University in Cairo students take upon admission to the engineering program. It is required of students in all disciplines of engineering. It is a one-credit-hour course that covers topics including history of engineering, engineering fields of specializations, the engineering profession, engineering communications, engineering ethics, and societal obligations. Community-based learning (CBL) was introduced into the course via the required course project. The project was to design toys for children at a school in a disadvantaged squatter community in Old Cairo, Egypt, where infrastructure is poor and education and social mobility can be very limited. The project was carried out in partnership with a non-governmental organization based in Old Cairo. This paper shows how the introductory engineering course was redesigned to integrate CBL while meeting the stated ABET course outcomes. Included are detailed instructions on the tools and structure of the project to provide an example for others wishing to adapt some of these tools to other courses. The paper presents the outcome assessments and survey results to evaluate the project’s success at meeting the stated outcomes and includes a discussion on the benefits to the students and the community partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforms in undergraduate engineering curriculum to produce engineers with entrepreneurial skills should address real-world problems relevant to industry and society with active industry support. Technology-assisted, hands-on projects involving experimentation, design simulation and prototyping will transform graduates into professionals with necessary skills to create and advance knowledge that meets global standards. To achieve this goal, this paper proposes establishing a central facility, ‘Centre for Engineering Experimentation and Design Simulation’ (CEEDS) in autonomous engineering colleges in India. The centre will be equipped with the most recent technology resources and computational facilities where students execute novel interdisciplinary product-oriented projects benefiting both industry and society. Students undertake two projects: a short-term project aimed at an engineering solution to a problem in energy, health and environment and the other a major industry-supported project devoted to a product that enhances innovation and creativity. The paper presents the current status, the theoretical and pedagogical foundation for the centre's relevance, an activity plan and its implementation in the centre for product-based learning with illustrative examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Employer complaints of engineering graduate inability to 'apply knowledge' call for a better understanding of the theory-practice relationship in technology-driven twenty-first century industries. A novel systems-based model was developed to analyse how mechatronics engineering practitioners apply mathematics, physics and logic-based knowledge to practical problems in different industrial systems contexts. Theoretically and methodologically, the research draws on the work of Herbert Simon, Basil Bernstein and Legitimation Code Theory. The graphic analysis of the relationship between the problem solver and problem structure in different industrial contexts demonstrates that different ways of thinking are required in considering the 'what' and the 'how' of the problem under different conditions. Current curricula not only need to explicitly enable the shifting between different engineering thinking 'codes', but also need to promote a more conceptual grasp of contextual factors. This paper offers a research-informed perspective on what 'apply knowledge' really means in twenty-first century engineering contexts. (149) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the current state of the Ukrainian system of engineering education indicates the prevalence of traditional teaching-learning approaches in contrast to the modern needs of the labour market. Many universities across the world use the problem/project-based learning (PBL) which is an effective approach for the development of design and management skills of engineering students. The paper describes a detailed structure of a PBL course in project management and practical experience related to its implementation in an engineering degree programme at Bohdan Khmelnytsky National University of Cherkasy. Also, the results of surveys carried out in order to study the students’ generic competences’ development and perception of the PBL process are presented. The results show that students understand the diversity of PBL aspects and the influence of the PBL approach on their professional characteristics such as teamwork, ability of self-directed learning, communication and problem-solving skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ongoing efforts to broaden the participation of women and people of colour in engineering degree programmes and careers have had limited success. This paper describes a different approach to broadening participation that seeks to work with all students and develop inclusive engineering identities. Researchers worked with the instructors of two first-year engineering courses to integrate curriculum activities designed to promote the formation of engineering identities and build an appreciation for how diversity and inclusion strengthen engineering practice. Multilevel modelling results indicated positive effects of the intervention on appreciation for diversity but no effects on engineering identity, and qualitative results indicated students learned the most about diversity not through one of the intervention activities, but through team projects in the courses. We also describe lessons learned in how to teach engineering students about diversity in ways that are relevant to engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fully flipped mode teaching approach is challenging for students in advanced engineering courses, because of demanding pre-class preparation load, due to the complex and analytical nature of the topics. When this is applied to large classes, it brings an additional complexity in terms of promoting the intended active learning. This paper presents a novel selective flipped mode teaching approach designed for large and advanced courses that has two aspects: (i) it provides selective flipping of a few topics, while delivering others in traditional face-to-face teaching, to provide an effective trade-off between the two approaches according to the demands of individual topics and (ii) it introduces technology-enabled live in-class quizzes to obtain instant feedback and facilitate collaborative problem-solving exercises. The proposed approach was implemented for a large fourth year course in electrical power engineering over three successive years and the criteria for selecting between the flipped mode teaching and traditional teaching modes are outlined. Results confirmed that the proposed approach improved both students’ academic achievements and their engagement in the course, without overloading them during the teaching period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a non-classical logic course primarily indicated for graduate students in electrical engineering and energy engineering. The content of this course is based on the vision that it is not enough for a student to indefinitely accumulate knowledge; it is necessary to explore all the occasions to update, deepen, and enrich that knowledge, adapting it to a complex world. Therefore, this course is not tied to theoretical formalities and tries at each moment to provide a practical view of the non-classical logic. In the real world, the inconsistencies are important and cannot be ignored because contradictory information brings relevant facts, sometimes modifying the entire result of the analysis. As consequence, the non-classical logics, such as annotated paraconsistent logic – APL, are efficiently framed in the approach of complex situations of the real world. In APL, the concepts of unknown, partial, ambiguous, and inconsistent knowledge are referred not to trivialise any system in analysis. This course presents theoretical and applicable aspects of APL, which are successfully used in decision-making structures. The course is divided into modules: Basic, 2vAPL, 3vAPL, 4vAPL, and Final Project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Minimal research papers have investigated the use of student evaluations on the laboratory, a learning medium usually run by teaching assistants with little control of the content, delivery and equipment. Finding the right mix of teaching assistants for the laboratory can be an onerous task due to the many skills required including theoretical and practical know-how, troubleshooting, safety and class management. Using larger classes with multiple teaching assistants, a team-based teaching (TBT) format may be advantageous. A rigorous three-year study across twenty-five courses over repetitive laboratory classes is analysed using a multi-level statistical model considering students, laboratory classes and courses. The study is used to investigate the effectiveness of the TBT format, and quantify the influence each demonstrator has on the laboratory experience. The study found that TBT is effective and the lead demonstrator most influential, influencing up to 55% of the laboratory experience evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the development of an engineering curriculum for a new industrial engineering programme at a medium-sized private university in the northeast United States. A systems engineering process has been followed to design and develop the new curriculum. Considering the programme curriculum as a system, first the stakeholders have been identified, and some preliminary analysis on their needs and requirements has been conducted. Following that, the phases of conceptual design, preliminary design, and detailed design have been pursued during which different levels of validation, assessment, and evaluation processes have been utilised. In addition, a curriculum assessment and continuous improvement process have been developed to assess the curriculum and the courses frequently. The resulting curriculum is flexible, allowing the pursuit of accelerated graduate programmes, a second major, various minor options, and study-abroad; relevant, tailored to the needs of industry partners in the vicinity; and practical, providing hands-on education, resulting in employment-ready graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to identify faculty perspectives on the integration of work-related issues in engineering education. A mixed methods approach was used to explore faculty attitudes towards work-related learning, to describe activities related to working life that have been introduced into the curriculum and to identify factors that faculty see as important if the amount of work-related learning is to increase. The results show that faculty members are positive about integrating work-related issues into the curriculum. Programmes with more extensive connections to industry offer more integrated activities, such as projects with external actors, and use professional contacts established through research in their teaching. In order to increase work-related learning in engineering curricula, faculty request clear goals and pedagogical tools. Other options to increase work-related learning include offering faculty the opportunity to work outside academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problem: The professional practice of engineering always involves engineering management, but it is difficult to know what specifically to include in the undergraduate curriculum. Approach: The population of New Zealand practising engineers was surveyed to determine the importance they placed on specific professional practice and engineering management competencies. Findings: Results show that communication and project planning were the two most important topics, followed by others as identified. The context in which practitioners use communication skills was found to be primarily with project management, with secondary contexts identified. The necessity for engineers to develop the ability to use multiple soft skills in an integrative manner is strongly supported by the data. Originality: This paper is one of only a few large-scale surveys of practising engineers to have explored the soft skill attributes. It makes a didactic contribution of providing a ranked list of topics which can be used for designing the curriculum and prioritising teaching effort, which has not previously been achieved. It yields the new insight that combinations of topics are sometimes more important than individual topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a descriptive account of how short-term international and multicultural experiences can be integrated into early design experiences in an aerospace engineering curriculum. Such approaches are considered as important not only in fostering a student's interest in the engineering curriculum, but also exposing them to a multicultural setting that they are likely to encounter in their professional careers. In the broader sense, this programme is described as a model that can be duplicated in other engineering disciplines as a first-year experience. In this study, undergraduate students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Universidad del Turabo (UT) in Puerto Rico collaborated on a substantial design project consisting of designing, fabricating, and flight-testing radio-controlled model aircraft as a capstone experience in a semester-long course on Fundamentals of Flight. The two-week long experience in Puerto Rico was organised into academic and cultural components designed with the following objectives: (i) to integrate students in a multicultural team-based academic and social environment, (ii) to practise team-building skills and develop students’ critical thinking and analytical skills, and finally (iii) to excite students about their engineering major through practical applications of aeronautics and help them decide if it is a right fit for them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]