By Lucy Berthoud

At the end of April 2020 I was planning to go to the IEEE Educon, a 4 day conference focussed on Engineering Education. The IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) is a series of conferences that rotate among central locations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. It was to be held in Porto, Portugal. But, at the last minute due to COVID-19, the organisers had to pivot (I am loving the use of the word ‘pivot’ everywhere, aren’t you?) and put the conference online. I wanted to share a little about my first experience of an online conference for those who might be contemplating joining one themselves.

How was it run?

Shifting the conference from actual to online, just a month before it was due, must have meant a huge amount of work behind the scenes. The organisers used Cisco Webex as the platform, setting up each of the parallel sessions with a room code. The platform seemed very stable, but hopping between sessions was logistically quite difficult. You could ask questions live, by chat, you could vote and there was a nice groups/whiteboard facility which was used very creatively in some workshops on the first day.

The terror of being a presenter

As a presenter, I was asked to upload a narrated powerpoint file and a pdf of my slides a couple of weeks in advance (the paper had been sent in two months before the conference), but I was expected to present my 10min talk live. This model worked fairly smoothly as if the presenter was having technical difficulties or didn’t turn up (this happened surprisingly frequently) then either the pdf or the video of the talk could be shown.

I was quite worried about presenting live from my little attic with my desktop pc and a webcam. But when I saw that many presenters and moderators were presenting from bedrooms, lounges and laptops, I felt embarrassed that I was so relatively well equipped! The actual presentation went smoothly mostly because I had dropped into an IT support room that the organisers had provided. This enabled me to check out in advance that everything was working. I saw some presenters who would have benefited from speaking more slowly and clearly, not reading out the text on the slides and interacting with their audience a bit more (basically all the normal things that we like and don’t like about presentations).

Should I go?

So, was it worth it? Apparently only 50 of the roughly 450 attendees dropped out of the conference when it went online. It was certainly worthwhile to hear some of the presentations and to be inspired by exciting ideas that others are trying. It was also rewarding to present the University of Bristol’s exciting work in engineering education (see more here). However, in terms of meeting people in your area and finding out informally about other practitioner’s research, it was definitely a poor relation of a “f2f” conference. F2f – three symbols which represent such an important, difficult to define and precious experience which I greatly missed.

There was recently been at a one day conference run by JISC on Learning Analytics (namely, the collection and analysis of data on student learning patterns). The event was the culmination of a pilot study involving the Universities of South Wales, Gloucester and Greenwich, the focus of which was to explore the use and benefits of learning analytics to higher education institutions.

To this end, JISC and the project partners have developed a “Data Hub” repository to collect data, a “Data Explorer” dashboard for staff to explore student progress and a “Study Goal” app to help students understand their own progress.

The system collates data from various sources, including in-class attendance registers, VLE interaction (tracking data from Moodle and/or Blackboard) and usage patterns of learning resources (such as computing facilities, lab equipment, library resources etc.). This data can then be made available to both staff and students in order to improve aspects of the teaching and learning process.

In what kinds of scenarios might such data be useful ?

• Imagine knowing exactly what each of your personal tutees have been up to (instead of having to ask them the usual speculative “so how are things going” type questions).
• Imagine the annual revision of unit content with the aid of detailed insight into which lectures and materials had been most popular (and which had been overlooked or ignored).
• Imagine being able to predict which students on your unit were on track to get first class grades (and which students are likely to fail) … even before you have actually set the assignment !

Sure, there are a myriad of challenges and issues to be overcome – not least of which are: technical problems of development and deployment such a system; The Orwellian dystopia of constant monitoring (there was even talk of attendance tracking using geolocation !); The difficulty of performing analysis on partial or inaccuracy information.

But in these times of growing cohort sizes and increasing emphasis on student well-being, perhaps this could be a positive step forward in terms of awareness of engagement and insight into student learning patterns and progress ?

By Thea Morgan, March 2019

Our Engineering Design students have been trialling out our two new collaborative, technology enabled design studios this teaching block. The brain-child of CAME’s Sean Lancastle and Joel Ross, this introduction of the very latest in technology enhanced learning has been eagerly awaited by both students and teaching staff. The two studios together have capacity for 72 students.

The exciting new spaces contain ‘pods’ for group design work, with each pod featuring a leaf-shaped table for six students, a large display screen, and a Microsoft Surface Studio. Each pod is linked to the main lectern, which itself has a Surface Studio and main display screen behind. From here you can control all six pods, which can either be in ‘teaching mode’ for lecturing (all pods show the lecture slides), or ‘collaborative mode’ for group work (each pod displays its own Surface Studio content). The Surface Studios are installed with digital sketching software (Autodesk Sketchbook), allowing students to sketch directly onto the screen.

Early feedback from students on the new spaces has been excellent. They love the Surface Studios, and the possibility they provide of group interactive sketching and design work. The Surface Studios also enable the keeping of group digital design logs, where all project information can be recorded, manipulated, displayed, and accessed easily as a group. The leaf-shaped tables also help facilitate this collaborative work, by allowing groups to sit facing each other, whilst still having a good view of the pod’s display screen, Surface Studio, and the main lectern.

From a teaching perspective there seems a noticeable difference in how groups are interacting. When working in previous, more conventional lecture-style spaces, groups have had a tendency to splinter into pairs or individuals to work on their own laptops, or to leave the space altogether to use the computer rooms elsewhere in the school. The new pods enable the groups to stay together in one place, and to work-on the same material together. There certainly seems to be more group discussion going on!

Whilst these initial observations are anecdotal, they are promising, and there are plans afoot to carry out formal studies of collaborative learning in these spaces by members of our very own EERG. Watch this space!

A few of the members of the EERG recently attended the UK & IE Engineering Education Research Network’s 6th Annual Symposium. This research network is a rapidly expanding group of engineering educators who see the value of sharing not only best-practice, but also new and innovative approaches to engineering education.

The annual symposium is an opportunity to present results of research work, get feedback on works-in-progress, meet new collaborators as well as develop new skills in a number of short workshops. Keynotes talks this year included the engineering engagement and out-reach opportunities offered by the Mary Rose project. Also of particular relevance was a talk on the experiences of establishing an engineering education research group.

Paper presentations at the conference consisted covered a wide variety of topics, including the impact of attendance monitoring, automated analysis outreach activities, performing systematic research reviews and phenomenology. Unusual and interesting ideas presented included the use of industrial espionage in group work to provoke the discussion of ethics in engineering. There was also a fascinating talk from the Open University on remote/telematic access to electro-mechanical lab equipment by distance learners.

Papers from the workshop are soon to be published in the symposium proceedings

Welcome to the new blog for the Faculty of Engineering‘s Engineering Education Research Group. The EERG was approved as an ’emerging research group’ in May 2018, and consists of members from both CAME and SCEEM schools. More info to come!