Setting Sail for my First Conference: A Reflection by Erin Brady

Posted on by erin.brady
Photo of Erin smiling in front of the conference venue.
I wanted to capture a selfie outside the conference venue on the first day, however the EDUCON banner is illegible here.

To be honest, my interest in attending the IEEE EDUCON2024 conference in mid-May was definitely heightened by its location on the Dodecanese island of Kos. Though I took some extra holiday with my partner to enjoy this small Greek island, the commitment to attending and presenting at the 4-day conference (which hosted over 400 people from across the world) was still very daunting. What’s more, I was the only researcher attending from Bristol.

This was my first conference since beginning my PhD, and I was to present a co-authored paper about evaluating the Student EERG with Becky Selwyn. I was apprehensive to say the least; I didn’t know of anyone else who was attending. The presentations on the first two days related less to my teaching and research than I had anticipated, so it was a challenge to engage with other presenters by asking questions about their work. I felt a little lost on the first couple of days, but assured myself that I would “find an in” to connect with someone properly.

When I found among the presenters listed in the conference app the name of a co-author for another conference proposal I recently submitted, I was delighted and relieved. A tentative email asking whether I could introduce myself in-person was sent. They near-instantly replied with “Yes, let’s meet. Shall we say (during the coffee break), next to the IEEE Education Society booth?”.

Photo from the back of a conference talk room.
The Kos International Convention Centre’s Panacea Amphitheatre where the keynotes were held was a vast space, and I was one of hundreds in the audience.

Introductions with their contacts and friends snowballed from there. I worked up to courage to be more open, reciting my new line “what’s your area of expertise?” to make acquaintances at almost every opportunity. And, over the next two days, I grew more confident to engage in deeper conversations about my own teaching and research with others.

By the end of the final day, I had been invited to at least two other conferences, enthusiastically asked to collaborate on projects about student research, and had made a plethora of new contacts who were keen to keep in touch. While networking itself lies very much within my comfort zone, the uncertainty of whether other attendees would be keen to connect with me – especially as someone new to the field – made me a little unsure of myself. Trying and succeeding to network on my own has built up my confidence much more, and I am very excited to see some of these new connections at other conferences in the future.

Photo of a sunset over the beach and quayside.
A bus tour was arranged for conference attendees around Kos Town on the second evening. On the final day, my partner and I revisited the quayside on foot and to take a wealth of photos like this one.

 

Horizons in STEM 2024

Posted on by r.selwyn and joel.ross

Hosting Horizons

In June 2024, the University of Bristol hosted the Horizons in STEM conference. It was organised by a local committee, led by Dr Alice Robson, which included representatives from across the STEM disciplines, including members of the EERG Becky Selwyn, Joel Ross, Jemma Rowlandson, and Jude Bramton. We reached the Bill Brown Design Suite’s maximum capacity of 150 in-person delegates, with a small number of online delegates in addition.

Horizons in STEM Bristol 2024 logo

EERG were able to fund 15 group members, including 3 students, to attend this conference. There was a mix of members presenting posters, papers, and workshops, as well as a number of people attending a pedagogical conference for the first time.

Highlights from delegates

In case you need more inspiration to investigate the Horizons in STEM conference in 2025, which will be hosted by Aston University, here is what some of the EERG-sponsored delegates described as their highlights of the conference:

Jemma Rowlandson, Senior Lecturer, EEME:

“There were many, many highlights! One of mine was the short talk format. It was great to hear about the work being done across the HE sector and the 15 minutes talks meant we got to listen to a real breadth across a range of disciplines. The conference was really inspiring and I came away with so many ideas of things we could do with our courses here in Bristol. Along a similar line, another highlight was the chance to connect and speak to people all over the UK. It was absolutely fascinating the different approaches between Universities and disciplines and as someone still quite new to this area I feel like I really picked up on a lot of top tips and look forward to implementing them later on.”

Yani Berdeni, Lecturer, SEMT:

“An excellent talk on outreach in chemistry in deprived parts of Liverpool by Andrea Mallaburn. As well as being full of interesting ideas to promote scientific engagement, it was fascinating to see their analysis of the data they had obtained on the efficacy of the outreach programme.”

Hugo Lindskog, UG, EEME:

“To me the highlight of the conference was presenting the workshop. As one of the few undergrads at the conference, I found it to be a very exhilarating experience and a great opportunity to practice public speaking.”

Erin Brady, PGR, EEME:

“I think that the nature of the conference meant that even some very rigorous research was presented in a playful way – which really helps to get across how pedagogic researchers want to engage students!”

Simon Lock, Senior Lecturer, CS:

“Informally, the best part of the conference was the posters. I basically wandered around with a cup of tea chatting to people; I came away with concrete ideas about how to solve the two main problems I am facing in the coming academic year (namely what to do about Plagiarism and how to deal with generative AI). Not bad for one afternoon shooting the breeze”

Welcome back!

Posted on by r.selwyn and joel.ross

Welcome back sign with a smiley face

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Welcome back to the blog for the Engineering Education Research Group!

We’ve been on an extended blog break (pandemic overhang), but the EERG blog is now back with new co-heads of the group, and a new series of blog posts to hopefully help, inspire, and inform.

Joel Ross and Becky Selwyn were appointed co-heads of the group in late 2023, and had a busy few months uncovering Faculty funding to support various members of the group to attend pedagogical conferences (sometimes for the first time) and to undertake various research projects (more on those in later posts).

Joel is a newly-promoted Associate Professor in Engineering Experimental Practice Education in the School of Civil, Aerospace, and Design Engineering. He has pioneered the use and evaluation of home lab kits to encourage playful learning and develop confidence in engineering students.

Becky is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical, Electronic, and Mechanical Engineering. She has most recently been working on a project to make peer feedback work (or at least feel mostly acceptable) to 1st year students writing lab reports in Engineering by Investigation.

We hope the group will strengthen the community for disciplinary pedagogic researchers, and allow our members to innovate and lead the way with high impact best practices.

Your Co-Heads of Group,

Becky and Joel

Should you submit to that virtual conference?

Posted on by simon.lock

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.

JISC Learning Analytics

Posted on by simon.lock

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 ?

New collaborative design studios in the school of CAME

Posted on by simon.lock

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!

UK & IE Engineering Education Research Network’s Annual Symposium

Posted on by simon.lock

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