In this Section:
Mini-Projects at Scottish HEIs
The Centre funded 3 Mini-Projects at Scottish HEIs in 2007/8 that link with four of the Enhancement Themes: The First Year, Flexible Delivery, Integrative Assessment and Research-Teaching Linkages. The projects are currently concluding and submitting their final reports which will be available shortly.
The funded projects are:
The Robert Gordon University (RGU) looked at "Enhancing the first year experience and employability by aligning expectations with experience". The Robert Gordon University is introducing an activity week for first year students, which includes a day spent at the premises of an industrial sponsor. This will form part of a holistic programme of professional development spanning the degree course. Workshops allow students to explore their own, the university’s and the employer’s expectations of engineering graduates and resulting in a closer alignment of expectations.The mini-project funding has been used to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of this intervention.
This mini-project was led by Dr Norrie Edward at RGU. Sadly Norrie died in October 2008. He is greatly missed by his colleagues and students. The work he began on introducing Activity Weeks for first and second year students will be continued.
"The assessment of the need for enhanced subject insight in first year engineering" Mini-Project was led by Stephen Warrington, Tom Bruce and Velda McCune at the University of Edinburgh:
The project aims to establish the level of subject and career exploration among those entering a first year engineering class, to track how this is (or isn’t) enhanced by the existing first year curricula, and to identify and explore themes which could well inform a subsequent “root and branch” reworking of first year engineering teaching and learning.
Barry Beggs at Glasgow Caledonian University, led on a project based on the research-teaching linkages theme, "Establishing a virtual online journal for students". It has focused on the student learning experience including graduate attributes and engaging the research community in enhancing the quality of the student learning experience.
The mini-project aims to develop an interactive, virtual online journal to allow students to submit technical papers and have them published. With partners at the Robert Gordon University and at the University of Strathclyde, the virtual journal will be developed to accept submissions based on final year undergraduate and MSc projects in engineering.
For more information please contact Simon Steiner at simon@engsc.ac.uk
Background
The Engineering Subject Centre made this offer to fund Mini-Projects at Scottish HEIs that link with a number of nominated themes under the QAA's Scottish Quality Enhancement (SQE) Themes initiative.
The Enhancement Themes initiative aims to enhance the student learning experience in Scottish higher education by identifying specific areas (themes) for development. The themes encourage academic and support staff and students to share current good practice and collectively generate ideas and models for innovation in learning and teaching. The themes are part of the Quality Enhancement Framework.
The four eligible nominated themes under this invitation were:
The Centre's aim in funding Mini-Projects is to provide opportunity for the sharing and development of good practice and resources in engineering education that will be beneficial to the wider engineering community, and to encourage subject-based pedagogic research. This invitation to bid was made only to HEIs in Scotland, to work in any one (or more) of the nominated themes.
Please see our funding opportunities webpage for more information on other funding schemes offered by the Engineering Subject Centre that are open to all HEIs across the UK.