Digital Commons Network^™

Tell It With Commits To Git, Pia Niemelä, Jenni Hukkanen, Mikko Nurminen, Antti Sand, Hannu-Matti Järvinen

Research Papers

In the realm of higher education, team work is considered a crucial factor in facilitating the development of collaborative and work-life skills among students. Studies have shown that collaborative tasks promote a sense of community, belonging, and wellbeing among students. However, uneven work distribution and vague team roles can lead to dissatisfaction and reduced commitment, ultimately resulting in assignment failure and impeding progress towards graduation. This paper examines students’ feedback on Britton et al.’s (2017) team quality questionnaire, along with their contributions to team performance. Additional questions were added to gauge how students communicate and organize their work within their …

Self-Assessment Or Peer Assessment? Which Is Better Predictor Of Test Results, Nárcisz Kulcsár

Research Papers

Internationally accredited engineering programmes are becoming increasingly important in the internationalisation agenda of universities. ABET has highlighted transversal skills in its accreditation criteria for engineering degrees. Preferred transferable skills include the ability of students to reflect on their own performance, the ability to give constructive feedback and the ability to make judgements. Students' self- and peer-assessment was examined in the context of a basic mathematics course. During the maths midterm tests, students self-assessed on each task, and assessed another student’s test. These assessments were compared with the points given by the teacher. 84% of students overestimated their actual performance and …

Campfire Talk Game, An Unsupervised Intervision Game For Students And Staff, Pleun Hermsen, Sjoerd Van Dommelen, Paula Hueso Espinosa

Workshops

Are you witnessing students facing concerns, difficulties, and problems throughout their educational journey? Perhaps you know PhDs, lecturers, or support staff who encounter challenges in their educational, research, or teaching paths. Openly addressing these issues can prove beneficial in all of these scenarios! While coaching is a potential solution, it can be time-consuming and demanding, right? Instead, let them have a Campfire Talk: a non-intrusive and socially safe serious game that requires no supervision. It provides a platform for discussing struggles that in practice are often difficult to address or overlooked but can deeply affect individual or group behavior. During …

Democratic Education Within The Standard Curriculum At Tu Berlin - A Quantitative And Qualitative Analysis, André Baier, Noemi Tenhagen

Research Papers

Introduction - Technische Universität Berlin (TU Berlin) was founded after the Second World War on the ruins of its predecessor. At its inauguration it was bound to promote democracy through its education. This view is further held up through the university law of the federal state of Berlin which states that the disciplinary competences are to be acquired in such a way so that students are able to act democratically. This spirit is still alive at TU Berlin and over the past decades it led to several educational concepts which reach beyond traditional methods of teaching/learning and which expand the …

How To Make Calculus Assignments Not Boring? Designing Calculus Assessment With The Constructive, Contextual, Collaborative, And Self-Directed Principles Of Problem-Based Learning., Martijn Boussé, Gavin Phillips, Stefan Jongen, Lonneke Bevers

Workshops

No abstract provided.

Building Collaboration And Learning Mechanisms For Sustainable Development, Aida Guerra, Dan Jiang

Workshops

No abstract provided.

Using Technology To Teach/Learn Mathematics, How Are We As Teachers Fostering Mathematics Education Mobility?, Deolinda Maria L. Dias Rasteiro, Ascensión Hernandez Encinas, Araceli Queiruga-Dios, María Jesús Santos Sánchez, Agustin Martín, Luis Hernández-Álvarez, Miguel Ángel González De La Torre, Alicia Pose Díez De La Lastra

Workshops

No abstract provided.

Teamwork Skills Development In Engineering Education: A Holistic Approach, Callum Kimpton, Nicoleta Maynard

Research Papers

Engineering is a profession grounded in teamwork with the need for engineering students and professionals to possess the ability to integrate their work efforts seamlessly and effectively towards a common goal. This in turn necessitates the need for a comprehensive, tailored, and relevant overarching conceptual framework to be constructed to ensure that our subsequent generations of engineers are equipped to efficiently tackle existential societal problems including anthropogenic climate change and the multi-faceted nature of sustainable development. This paper motivates, details, and presents a conceptual framework for implementing successful engineering teams in tertiary engineering projects. The emergent conceptual framework presented is …

The Need For Interdisciplinarity: A Case On Employees’ Perspectives, Dennis Friedrichsen, Maiken Winther, Anette Kolmos

Research Papers

The issue of interdisciplinarity contains disparate nodes of knowledge and practices, including a wealth of information concerning the potential and value of interdisciplinary work. In the context of companies that handle large-scale and complex tasks, interdisciplinarity takes on a real-life role since its presence and importance is readily observable and, as this paper shows, a conscious, deliberate, and highly valued aspect of innovation in companies. Academic literature on the issue of interdisciplinarity asserts that engineers in the future need a wealth of competences, including ability to collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. Aalborg University in Denmark has experimented with interdisciplinarity in various …

Teaching Excellence Programs – Lessons Learned At Two Universities, Kristina Edström, Cindy Poortmann, Marie Magnell, Priyanka Pereira

Research Papers

Universities are seeking novel ways to strengthen the collective educational competence of their faculty and promote educational merits. In this paper we describe and compare the experiences of two recently started initiatives for teaching excellence, the Program for Future Leaders for Strategic Educational Development at KTH Royal Institute of Technology (henceforth KTH) and the Teaching Fellowship Programme at the University of Twente. Both programs have recently completed one complete round of implementation. The programmes are similar in that the participants work on a project of their own for an extended time, while also being part of a community with regular …

Impact Of Teacher Training On Enhancing Sustainability Integration Into Engineering Education, Paula Schönach, Noora Jaakkola, Meeri Karvinen

Research Papers

Engineering education institutions face a growing demand to provide graduates with adequate skills to respond to the sustainability crisis at hand. One approach to address this is to integrate sustainability as a cross-cutting theme into programmes and courses. At the same time competence development of academic staff is seen as an essential, yet underdeveloped prerequisite for a sustainability paradigm shift.

Aiming at enhancing sustainability integration into engineering education, this study investigates the impact of pedagogical training on the skills and motivations of teachers to embed sustainability into their teaching. A new pedagogical course (3 ECTS) on sustainability in teaching was …

The Role Of Earth System Literacy In Sustainability Education For Engineers, Sudeshna Basu

Research Papers

Engineers should be able to demonstrate sustainability competencies transcending their specialised discipline. But all cross-disciplinary sustainability competencies are not targeted adequately in engineering education and are often mismatched with competencies required by engineers in their professional roles. Future engineers should have an understanding of the environment alongside technical knowledge, with all engineering design and product showing consideration to sustainability. The study of the Earth system is relevant to the understanding of environmental issues and the interplay between the sub-systems of the Earth (atmosphere, geosphere, biosphere and hydrosphere) . Yet, integration of Earth system literacy in the engineering curriculum has received …

Preliminary Mapping Of Bachelors’ Research To Enhance Digital Construction In Ireland, Shannon Chance, Barry Mcauley

Research Papers

This paper presents preliminary analyses to assess the content of student research conducted through a digital construction course offered to engineers and built environment professionals in Ireland since 2020. The course aims to upskill employed, mature students with a one-year intensive study period in Building Information Modelling (BIM/Digital Construction), and ultimately enable them to earn an honors-level Bachelor of Science degree. Obtaining this degree requires the student to produce a research dissertation, and the course helps students use research and research-thinking to answer pressing questions they encounter in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) context. The paper briefly discusses context …

Draw Education: Graduate Student Perceptions Of Education Using An Arts-Informed Approach, Lisa Schibelius, Homero Murzi

Research Papers

Education has been shifting to foster better learning environments for students with instructors as co-constructors of knowledge in the classroom. Part of this educational transformation has been accomplished through graduate student education in preparing the next generation of educators to adopt student-centered teaching approaches. Change, however, can be slow, and implementation in the classroom looks different across disciplines. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of graduate students’ perceptions of education when enrolled in a course on contemporary pedagogy. We seek to answer RQ: How do perceptions of education compare between graduate students in engineering and …

Why Do Students Dislike Peer Feedback?, Becky Selwyn, Joel Ross, Sean Lancastle

Research Papers

Engineers are required to communicate in a range of formats, including written reports, but this skill does not come naturally to undergraduates. Typical approaches to teaching writing skills require small class sizes, expert staff, and multiple cycles of feedback. These approaches, while successful, are difficult to scale and do not always result in students being able to transfer their writing skills to other units/topics.

The School of Civil, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bristol teaches writing skills mainly within a single 20-credit first-year unit, delivered to 550-650 students per year. Students are required to complete a number …

Community-Building Among Phd Students In Engineering Education Research: The Sefi Summer School And Aaee Winter School, Greet Langie, Keith Willey, Anne Gardner

Research Papers

Engineering Education Research (EER) is a rapidly evolving and increasingly valued research field. This supports the number of PhD students to grow steadily, but unfortunately, they are often limited to a few within the large engineering faculty/department, having different backgrounds and interests. Additionally, the research methodologies needed by EER researchers are usually different from the classical technical engineering research (TER) methodologies. This translates into a need for specific training and opportunities to get to know each other better in order to promote international collaboration and develop a community of practice. SEFI and the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) both …

Time To Rethink Engineering Outreach?, Robin Clark, Jane Andrews, Yiduo Wang, Gill Cooke, Ninna Makrinov

Research Papers

Starting with the research question ‘Does engineering outreach work?’ this paper looks at the often ‘sticky’ subject of the validity of engineering outreach in UK High Schools. It examines how Engineering Outreach Activities are conceptualised by external bodies (RAEng., 2016) and critiques the complex range of practical experiential engineering educational interventions offered in school (Neon, 2023, STEM learning, 2023). Drawing upon the findings of, what is, a small single strand of a much larger multi-method, longitudinal analysis of Engineering Education Outreach Activities provided across the West Midlands region of the UK (LBEEP, 2023) ], the paper provides a unique insight …

Evaluating The Fairness Of The Undergraduate Supports Survey: A Dif Analysis Of Gender And Year-In-School, Adrian Nat Gentry, Eric Holloway, Julie Martin, Tiantian Li, Kerrie Douglas

Research Papers

It is well established that access to social supports is essential for engineering students’ persistence and yet access to supports varies across groups. Understanding the differential supports inherent in students’ social networks and then working to provide additional needed supports can help the field of engineering education become more inclusive of all students.

Civil And Architectural Engineering Students’ Conceptualization Of Good Engineering And Its Implications For Ethics Education, Madeline Polmear

Research Papers

The ways in which students conceptualise what it means to do good engineering illuminates their values and priorities and shapes their understanding of ethics in engineering. The present study is part of a larger project that is exploring civil and architectural engineering students’ understanding of ethical and societal responsibility and its development via formal and informal learning. Data collection and analysis are ongoing in the larger project, and the present study focuses on eight semi-structured interviews with civil and architectural engineering students at one university in Belgium. The analysis was designed to address how civil and architectural students conceptualise good …

Exploring Engineering Students’ Perception Of Their Career Preparedness In A Systemic Pbl Context In Denmark, Anna Overgaard Markman, Svend Hauekrog Christiansen, Xiangyun Du

Research Papers

The demand for graduates who are well-prepared for employment remains a persistent concern. This study aims to examine the perceptions of career preparedness among engineering students in a systemic problem-based learning environment, employing a gender perspective. The data for this study was collected through two focus group interviews conducted with engineering students in their eighth semester. The collected data was then coded, resulting in the identification of three main categories: (1) professional competence development, (2) career anticipation, and (3) gender role. The findings of the study reveal that collaboration with external companies and the provision of practical support play a …

Empowering Students With Geospatial Solutions Through Challenge Based Learning, Farzaneh Dadrass Javan, Francesco Nex, Farhad Samadzadegan, Bashar Alsadik, Luuk Buuk, Omid Askari

Research Papers

Today, the field of Geospatial Solutions primarily focuses on spatial and mapping data, analysis, and technologies that primarily revolve around place and space. It is considered more as a tool or means rather than the ultimate objective of various interdisciplinary activities, where minimal attention is given to theoretical aspects, equations, and underlying principles of the subject. Conversely, despite advancements in science and technology and a broader audience for geospatial subjects, it is predominantly taught conventionally, disregarding the diverse needs and expectations of students. In recent years, there has been an exploration of innovative educational methods to utilize new pedagogical frameworks …

Job Competencies: Experiential Learning For Engineering Students, Eileen Goold, Roland Roland Vanoostveen

Research Papers

This study investigates the learning of engineering students within the context of career-focused education. Often the technical and mathematical sciences on which engineering courses are built fail to explain the entirety of the landscape of practice. The main objective of this study is to capture various constructs produced by an undergraduate student while relating to his social interactions and experiences in an authentic workplace. The study also explores the student’s responses to real-world contexts. This paper details a single case chosen using purposeful sampling, which investigates the phenomena of a student intern transitioning from engineering education to practice. The presented …

A Multimodal Measurement Of The Impact Of Deepfakes On The Ethical Reasoning And Affective Reactions Of Students, Vivek Ramachandran, Cécile Hardebolle, Nihat Kotluk, Touradj Ebrahimi, Reinhard Riedl, Patrick Jermann, Roland Tormey

Research Papers

Deepfakes - synthetic videos generated by machine learning models - are becoming increasingly sophisticated. While they have several positive use cases, their potential for harm is also high. Deepfake production involves input from multiple engineers, making it challenging to assign individual responsibility for their creation. The separation between engineers and consumers may also contribute to a lack of empathy on the part of the former towards the latter. At present, engineering ethics education appears inadequate to address these issues. Indeed, the ethics of artificial intelligence is often taught as a stand-alone course or a separate module at the end of …

Should Teaching Guides Be Used As Indicators Of Gender Dimension In A University Degree?, Elisabet Mas De Les Valls, Marta Peña, Noelia Olmedo-Torre, Amaia Lusa

Research Papers

In order to achieve a truly equality society, universities are making significant efforts towards gender mainstreaming. One of the main pillars of this approach is the implementation of a gender dimension in teaching. To assess the degree of progress towards this goal, suitable indicators, both qualitative and quantitative, are desirable. Surveys could be used to gather students’ perceptions or educators’ efforts as indicators, but an underutilised source of information is available in the teaching guides. Teaching guides are understood as those open-access documents where the public can find a subject’s description, goals, and contents, among other universityspecific features.The aim of …

A Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Approach To Studying The Development Of Students' Digital Agency In Higher Education, Lilian Ganduri, Brandon Collier-Reed, Corrinne Shaw

Research Papers

Researching classroom practice requires theoretical resources that can explain the variety inherent in such an activity as well as the dynamic nature of classroom practice. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) offers the possibility of accounts of social, cultural, and historical aspects of the context and of how students adapt and transform in these contexts. This conceptual paper engages with the relevance and utility of CHAT for researching student practices in a course as an activity system.

Are Engineering Teachers Ready To Leverage The Power Of Play To Teach Transversal Skills?, Siara Isaac, Yousef Jalali, Natascia Petringa, Roland Tormey, Jessica Dehler Zufferey

Research Papers

What conceptions do teachers hold about learning activities to develop students’ transversal skills? This qualitative exploration at a research-intensive engineering school draws on interviews and focus groups to explore teachers’ ideas about developing individual transversal skills. We frame our analysis with a model that distinguishes three phases for skill development: conceptual knowledge (knowing), procedural skills (doing) and meta-cognitive/emotional reflection (learning from doing). We are particularly interested in the potential for play to create favorable conditions for developing transversal skills by enabling (i) focused experiential learning, (ii) low-stakes experimentation, (iii) rapid feedback, (iv) opportunity for reflection.

A Look At Vocational And Academic Student Backgrounds In Ability To Solve Practical Problems, Gareth Thomson, Mark Prince

Research Papers

While most students in the UK will enter engineering degrees with traditional academic qualifications, a significant proportion will come from backgrounds which use vocational based qualifications to gain entry to degree level study. Indicators show that students from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to be among those using vocational qualifications to gain entry to University and may not progress as well. This is often linked to difficulties in traditional academic elements of the degree such as mathematics where both the content and learning approaches are much less familiar to students with a vocational background. These academic skills are not …

Exploring The Variation In Gender Balance On Undergraduate Engineering Courses In Uk Universities, Kate Bellingham, John E Mitchell, David Guile, Inês Direito

Research Papers

The underrepresentation of women in engineering remains a persistent issue despite efforts to attract more female students. The percentage of UK engineering undergraduates who are female is published annually, however no institutional breakdown is given. This scoping study aims to inform the direction of future research by investigating the nature and possible causes of the distribution of female engineering undergraduates across the UK HE-sector. Student data gathered from UK universities by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for 2019/20 is explored using Tableau. Overall, 16% of UK engineering undergraduates are female but this varies from 5% to 36% for individual …

Can Oral Examinations Replace Written Examinations?, Zixuan Mu, Fred Marquis

Research Papers

The purpose of any assessment is to determine students’ learning. While oral examinations have been adopted in many education systems, such as the PhD thesis viva and medical assessments (Huxham, Campbell, and Westwood 2012), they are rarely used in undergraduate engineering courses (Baghdadchi et al. 2022) which traditionally rely on written papers. This is not surprising given, generally, the large cohort sizes and the need to efficiently conduct such examinations in a timely manner. It has been shown that widening the range of assessments that a student experiences can lead to a more comprehensive development of the student (Rust 2005) …

Measuring Social Impacts In Engineering Education To Improve Sustainability Skills, Elisabeth Nierle, Martin Pieper

Research Papers

In times of social climate protection movements, such as Fridays for Future, the priorities of society, industry and higher education are currently changing. The consideration of sustainability challenges is increasing. In the context of sustainable development, social skills are crucial to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular, the impact that educational activities have on people, communities and society is therefore coming to the fore. Research has shown that people with high levels of social competence are better able to manage stressful situations, maintain positive relationships and communicate effectively. They are also associated with better academic performance …