Engineering Subject Centre 2011 Teaching Award winner announced
July 13th, 2011
Dr Esat Alpay, Imperial College London, received the accolade of Teaching Award Winner 2011 for his work on ethics in engineering education. The presentation took place during the Celebrating Excellence in Engineering Education event at Loughborough University.
Esat’s case study, ‘Student engagement in an engineering ethics course’ was compiled by Dr Jane Pritchard, from teaching observations, interviews and a focus group. It outlines the development and implementation of an engineering ethics course across a number of engineering departments at Imperial College London. The study explores students’ experiences of the engineering ethics course and reflects on Esat’s wider engagement with colleagues across the engineering departments to involve them with this course and also to embed components of engineering ethics across the different programmes.
Competition was very strong, with four other inspirational engineering educators selected as finalists for the award: Dr Elies Dekoninck, University of Bath with ‘Boosting creativity, design and prototyping skills for engineering innovation’; Peter Green, University of Manchester with ‘Microcontroller engineering themed engineering education’; Greg Rowsell, Harper Adams University with ‘Professional engineering design skills development’; and John Mills, University of Southampton, ‘Blended learning for foundation engineering students’.
What does it mean to win the award? Esat said
I feel incredibly privileged for winning the Teaching Award. It’s given my work a degree of validation and endorsement that feels very special: it’s not every day that highly-experienced, professional and respected educators from across the UK say to you ‘this is good and keep it up’! What’s been so fantastic about the Engineering Subject Centre is the community it has created amongst enthusiastic teachers, enabling us to get tangible (and occasionally moral!) support for teaching ideas and efforts. I certainly got plenty for my ethics work! It’s also been so motivating to belong to a group that highly values engineering education development, and has had the national clout to do something about it!
Supported by the Engineering Council
