Systems Thinking: when engineering education calls itself into question

When systems thinking was considered relevant to the Ecole Superieure d'lngenieurs de Marseille (ESIM) engineering curriculum, nobody realised to what extent it would modify the spirit and the structure of it. Neither did anybody foresee that it would play the role of a mirror where the educational system would have to look itself in the face! The main steps in re-structuring the curriculum and the broad lines of thinking developed along the lines of the systems approach are presented here. Strangely enough, systems thinking has apparently had more impact on programmes and on teaching than on the engineering faculty's practices... up to now.     

Barriers to student success in engineering education

In the UK, the USA and Australia, there have been calls for an increase in the number of engineering graduates to meet the needs of current global challenges. Universities around the world have been grappling with how to both attract more engineering students and to then retain them. Attrition from engineering programmes is disturbingly high. This paper reports on an element of research undertaken through an Australian Learning and Teaching Council-funded Fellowship that investigated the factors leading to student attrition in engineering programmes, by identifying barriers to student success. Here, we contrast a review of the literature related to student barriers and success with student perceptions, gathered through a series of focus groups and interviews at three Australian universities. We also present recommendations for action to try to remove barriers to student success.     

Producing ‘industry‐ready’ doctorates: Australian Cooperative Research Centre approaches to doctoral education

How the experience of science‐based Ph.D. students working in or funded by Australian Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) compares with their peers in regular university science‐based departments is the key focus of this article. CRC doctoral programmes that integrate industry needs with professional development offer an alternative to traditional research training, emphasizing producing ‘industry‐ready’ graduates with a broader educational experience linked to the needs of research users. The overall experience of both groups, their attitudes to collaboration with industry and where their studies are leading them are analysed. Of particular interest is whether CRC‐related Ph.D. students have more positive attitudes towards their training, towards industry and research and development (R&D) partnerships with industry than those outside CRCs and to what extent both favour the idea of careers in industry. Findings, based on a survey of Ph.D. students in two Australian research‐intensive universities, indicate that the CRC research training experience has much to commend it. This suggests that in reforming doctoral education programmes, universities would do well to further examine the effectiveness of aspects of this alternative.     

Assessing the performance of educational research in Australian universities: an alternative perspective

This study uses bibliometric data to assess the performance of educational research in Australian universities. It provides an alternative perspective to the Australian government’s Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assessment. ERA results suggest that the performance of educational research is substantially less compared to other disciplines, with only a handful of universities performing ‘above world standard’. I use a range of indicators that capture citation impact and journal quality from Elsevier’s SciVal research benchmarking tool to provide an alternative perspective that is authentic, transparent, comprehensive and multi-dimensional. The findings show that most Australian universities are performing above the world average in educational research. Australian universities perform especially well on the citation indicators, with more than 75% of universities performing above the world average on all three indicators. Performance on ERA is only moderately correlated with research performance in my analysis but is strongly related to one indicator, publication volume. This finding suggests that ERA assessments favour large entities and disadvantage smaller ones. The findings also suggest that the current ERA peer-review process may not accurately or fully reflect the performance of educational research in Australia. I anticipate that this alternative, bibliometric-based assessment will be a useful benchmarking tool for a range of purposes. I conclude with recommendations for future research.     

International dimension in engineering education

Engineers of the 21st century will spend appreciable portions of their careers in environments rich with global connections. Therefore, engineering colleges and universities must develop strategies that provide the global perspectives and international experiences that will help their graduates excel in this new world order. The current paper presents some European and American approaches to creating multi-organizational, international partnerships of academic and industrial organizations that emphasize collaborative educational programmes and research efforts that meet the globalization needs of faculty members, students, and industry.     

Closing the policy–practice gap for low-SES students in higher education: the pedagogical challenge

This paper reports on an interpretivist research study that sought to articulate the strategies being adopted by selected universities to recruit, teach and retain students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. The literature is clear that these students face more barriers and fewer encouragers than their peers to engage with higher education and that the institutional habitus of universities, including their pedagogies, does not always work in their favour – creating an impression that they do not belong. Using a naturalistic inquiry approach, 19 semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers and leaders from 12 Australian universities with a regional focus. Findings suggest that while these universities have successfully developed initiatives to recruit and support students from low SES backgrounds, less attention is being directed to the teaching and learning challenges and opportunities created by increased student diversity. New thinking, effective curricula and pedagogies, and transformative staff-development programmes are needed to capitalise on the potential benefits of a more socially diverse cohort.     

Perceptions of Chinese students in an Australian university: are we meeting their needs?

This short-term longitudinal study sought to identify the issues faced by a group of international Chinese students undertaking study in an Australian university. While the focus was on educational issues, socio-cultural and personal factors were also examined in an attempt to identify the sorts of strategies students used in settling into a new socio-cultural and educational context. Interviews conducted at the beginning and end of the first semester of study indicate a range of issues that are supported by previous studies. What has not previously been highlighted, however, is the emphasis on speaking and listening skills which students reported they needed to improve. Lack of proficiency in these areas was seen by students as hampering their active participation in class, leading to lack of confidence in approaching Australian students, and resulting in their inability to benefit from the “Australian experience”. Many existing academic support structures in Australian universities tend to emphasize support with written and study skills. While this is important because of the direct impact on assessment, it is perhaps now opportune to place some emphasis on developing strategies and programmes that will support the development of students' speaking and listening skills, with a focus on intercultural communication.     

Moving beyond face value: re-envisioning higher education evaluation as a generator of professional knowledge

Conventional student-led evaluation is now an orthodox feature of the North American, UK and Australian higher education landscape. Increasingly, it is guiding major institutional decisions around educational quality, academic promotion and more recently institutional funding by government. Yet significant research around student-led evaluation has demonstrated that this form of student opinion-based evaluation remains highly fragile and susceptible to multiple forms of influence. This paper argues that student-led evaluation of itself is not sufficiently robust to appropriately inform notions of educational quality or pedagogical capability of academics. An alternative approach to evaluation in higher education is proposed, broadly drawing on the conception of fourth generation evaluation. The model foregrounds academic collaboration in shaping a professional evaluative framework at an activity level (i.e. programme or sub-discipline level) based on an ongoing dialogue between peers and with students, as well as qualitative evaluation of student learning. The model attempts to make tensions and conflicts in the teaching and learning context more explicit and the active focus of evaluative efforts to devise appropriate and sustainable responses to improve the quality of learning and professional practice. This paper presents some preliminary research on the effectiveness of this model in its initial piloting in postgraduate programmes in an Australian university.     

Courses for teaching leadership capacity in professional engineering degrees in Australia and Europe

Recently, many educational institutions across the globe have implemented engineering leadership programmes either as a part of a formal engineering curriculum or where leadership development is embedded into separate in-house programmes. This shows the clear intent of these educational institutions to prepare their engineering students for solving real-world problems, recognising that both technical and leadership skills are valuable for tomorrow's engineers. Leadership programmes in engineering education have been implemented in various formats with varying degrees of success. It has already been identified in research studies that 80–90% of engineering leadership programmes offered explicitly across the globe were based in the United States of America. However, in Europe and Australia, there is a noticeable lack of engineering leadership programmes, particularly in undergraduate curricula. The programmes that are offered across Australia and Europe have distinct design and delivery styles but there are certain key features that are common to most of the programmes, including professional partnerships, mentoring, engineering design and project-based approaches.     

中国一流大学个性化教育的理论基础与现实困境

个性化教育是富有中国文化和教育传统的思想,也是中外学界公认的21世纪国际教育发展趋势之一。本文从教育活动三大主体层面分别探讨我国现行一流大学个性化教育的实践现状及存在问题。在理念层面,我国一流大学的个性化教育要继承并创新中国既有“因材施教”的教育传统;在实践层面,要突破目前主要集中在少数学业优秀学生群体、具有明显选拔性的做法,走向更具普惠性、面向所有学生的探索性实践。为此,建议一流大学在政策和制度层面,完善生师多元评价系统,以撬动个性化教育理念的落实;重塑整全的个性化教育体系,使个性化教育实践从培养特区向全员全段式发展;加强与基础教育改革的合作,在更大范围内带动个性化教育向各学级和全教育场域渗透。     

The preparation of cognitively agile principals for turnaround schools: a leadership preparation programme study

The purpose of this study was to examine the ability of two educational leadership university programmes to improve the cognitive agility of their graduates. The research looked to discover whether the aspiring principals exited the programmes with an increased ability to employ cognitive agility – the ability to use the multiple thinking skills of systems thinking, reflecting, and reframing – when engaged in their professional work and solving problems. Both Masters programmes were in School Leadership, offered through the same university department and following the same core curriculum leading to Level 1 educational leadership certification. The results indicate that of the two programmes studied, the Principal Rapid Orientation and Preparation in Educational Leadership (PROPEL) programme, designed to prepare leaders for turnaround schools, produced more cognitively agile graduates than the traditional Master’s programme. The mediating variables of participants’ years of experience and budget responsibility increased the level of cognitive agility of both programme’s graduates.     

美国高校创业教育的经验及对我国的启示

美国是全世界最早开展创业教育的国家,其创业教育已形成了一个相当完善的体系。本文通过对美国高校创业教育的分析,总结其创业教育的主要模式和特点,为我国高校创业教育的开展提供一定的视角和思路。     

Why build a network about introduction of sustainable development into scientific education?

More and more universities are thinking about the application of the concept of sustainable development to the education of engineers. In France, this movement generally results from isolated initiatives taken by committed individuals. In an attempt to make up lost ground, the Association pour les Pratiques du Developpement Durable has set up a working group, concerning the French engineering schools and universities which are preparing the way for the introduction of sustainable development into their teaching programmes, to pool their experience and optimize learning effects by identifying a number of principles and methods which should, in time, facilitate the spread of best practices among the members of the group and other educational establishments.     

The role of mathematics learning centres in engineering education

Mathematics departments in many universities, in many countries, are under pressure. The demand for mathematics undergraduate programmes is diminish- ing and service mathematics is under threat. In particular, engineering schools are either reducing the number of mathematics courses in degree programmes or engineering staff are teaching mathematics as part of engineering analysis courses. There is also a strong trend in engineering education to make greater use of computer courseware like Mathcad, Matlab and other software systems for the mathematical and statistical components of engineering programmes. Engineer- ing education is undergoing substantial change. The mathematics of engineering programmes will need to change accordingly. Mathematics learning centres have been established in many universities world-wide. Initially their main role was to provide assistance for those who had insufficient levels of competency in pre- requisite mathematics. However, these centres can also make a very useful contribution to the latest trends in the mathematics education of engineering undergraduates. This paper will describe that contribution.     

Interdisciplinarity and Systems Thinking: some implications for engineering education and education for industry

AS developments in science and technology accelerate the processes of social change, it becomes necessary to redefine educational objectives in engineering education. This paper examines some of the reasons for dissatisfaction with the limitations of single-discipline approaches to education, analysing these from a systems perspective. The paper considers the development of systems thinking in relation to engineering and raises some of the implications of systems thinking and systems methodologies for the planning of an interdisciplinary course. Finally, it refers to the course in technology and management at the University of Bradford, which is unified by a systemic philosophy and methodology, and considers the value added by such an approach, in human terms.     

Education for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR): a mapping of SRHR-related content in higher education in health care,police, law and social work in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Knowledge of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) by health care, police, legal and social work professionals has been shown to be insufficient. This lack of competence is likely to affect the quality of services. The aim of this study was to describe SRHR indicators in educational programmes in health care, police, legal and social work higher education in Sweden. A text-based analysis was conducted of written material from all educational programmes in law, midwifery, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, police work, psychology, social work and undergraduate medicine (93 educational programmes at 27 universities and university colleges). Representation of different SRHR indicators varied, but most were poorly covered in the educational programmes. Existing educational programmes lack comprehensiveness in their coverage of SRHR and are unequal both within and between the professions and universities. This situation creates the risk of inequalities in SRHR competence and suggests that needs within this field may be unmet. There is an urgent need therefore to enhance the presence of SRHR in health care, social work and law enforcement education in Sweden.     

The vocational–academic divide in neoliberal upper secondary curricula: the Swedish case

A historical tension between a more general and a more specific focus in post-compulsory education is made visible in some educational systems by the division into more academic and more vocational programmes. Embedded in this tension are questions of social justice and the purposes of education. In addition, division into academic and vocational programmes has class dimensions since youth with working class backgrounds are often over-represented in vocational programmes. This study investigates how this tension is handled in the Swedish upper secondary curriculum, which reflects an international neoliberal policy trend in promoting competition, employability and employer influence over the curriculum. By analysing how the educational content of vocational educational and training (VET) programmes and higher educational preparatory (HEP) programmes is contextualised, we found that the two programme types were based on very different logics. In VET programmes, knowledge is strongly context-bound and often related to regulating behaviours. This contrasts sharply with the way knowledge is contextualised in HEP programmes in which less context-bound knowledge and skills such as using concepts, models and critical thinking are dominant. Students in VET programmes are trained to ‘do’ and to ‘adapt’, while the students in HEP programmes are trained to ‘think’ and to ‘imagine possibilities’. Thus, students from different social classes are prepared for very different roles in society.     

Teacher education programmes delivered at a distance: An examination of distance student perceptions

Recent technological developments have greatly influenced the ways American universities deliver educational course offerings to students at a distance. The perception of pre-service teachers in distance education programmes is germane to the planning and delivery of distance education courses in teacher education departments in the future. The results of this American study revealed a differing perception between male and female students in the area of course structure, student/teacher interaction, overall course satisfaction and peer interaction. As a result of this study, recommendations are provided for teacher preparation programmes to improve distance education course offerings for prospective teachers in the USA and implications for educators involved in teacher preparation internationally.     

Facilitating the learning of all students: the ‘professional positive’ of inclusive practice in Australian primary schools

This article considers the positive aspects of inclusion in Australian primary schools through a historical account of the nation's journey to adopting current policies and practices. The authors suggest that across the different states the picture is positive as there are clear attempts to make Australian schools as inclusive as possible. The importance of adequately resourcing schools to support teachers in the implementation of an inclusive environment is discussed as being second in importance to teacher attitudes to inclusion. The combination of these two factors has a direct influence on a school's ability to be effectively inclusive as it is the teacher at the ground level who must ensure inclusion is effective. As a result of improvements in teacher education programmes at universities, where inclusive education subjects are now compulsory, teaching in an inclusive environment is the ‘professional positive’ of teacher practice, which may potentially improve educational outcomes for all involved.