Uncertainty analysis for peer assessment: oral presentation skills for final year project

Peer assessment plays an important role in engineering education for an active involvement in the assessment process, developing autonomy, enhancing reflection, and understanding of how to achieve the learning outcomes. Peer assessment uncertainty for oral presentation skills as part of the FYP assessment is studied. Validity and reliability for complex assessments were conceptualised in the context of quantification, hierarchical system of uncertainties, aleatory uncertainty, and epistemic uncertainty. Systems as assessment methods were also conceptualised to define elements (i.e. examiner, examinee, and difficulty) as variables or/and constants, and to study the uncertainty behaviour of the peer assessment within the framework of the parametric uncertainty model. As a result, a singularity, at which the hierarchical structure of uncertainties breaks down, and its related behaviour were theoretically predicted and experimentally verified. Also, a validity paradox, when the ‘difficulty’ level is sufficiently lowered, was found to be possible and verified for oral presentation skills. It may be useful for understanding fundamental characteristics of the peer assessment in which epistemic uncertainties are dependent on how the assessment is close to the singularity point.     

Designing,implementing and maintaining a first year project course in electrical engineering

Being a modern electrical engineer does not only require state of the art skills in areas such as transfer and processing of information, electronics, systems engineering, and biomedical electrical engineering; it also requires generic engineering skills such as oral and written communication, team building, interpersonal skills, and the ability to take the responsibility of solving assigned tasks. In the development of a new electrical engineering curriculum, it was considered a challenge to introduce these generic engineering skills in a more applicable way. The approach described in this paper has been very successful in implementing and maintaining a challenging first year project based engineering course with a high level of training of generic engineering skills.     

Remote access laboratories in Australia and Europe

Remote access laboratories (RALs) were first developed in 1994 in Australia and Switzerland. The main purposes of developing them are to enable students to do their experiments at their own pace, time and locations and to enable students and teaching staff to get access to facilities beyond their institutions. Currently, most of the experiments carried out through RALs in Australia are heavily biased towards electrical, electronic and computer engineering disciplines. However, the experiments carried out through RALs in Europe had more variety, in addition to the traditional electrical, electronic and computer engineering disciplines, there were experiments in mechanical and mechatronic disciplines. It was found that RALs are now being developed aggressively in Australia and Europe and it can be argued that RALs will develop further and faster in the future with improving Internet technology. The rising costs of real experimental equipment will also speed up their development because by making the equipment remotely accessible, the cost can be shared by more universities or institutions and this will improve their cost-effectiveness. Their development would be particularly rapid in large countries with small populations such as Australia, Canada and Russia, because of the scale of economy. Reusability of software, interoperability in software implementation, computer supported collaborative learning and convergence with learning management systems are the required development of future RALs.     

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.     

The impact of group design projects in engineering on achievement goal orientations and academic outcomes

This study examined the impact of incorporating group design projects into a second-year engineering class on achievement goal orientations and two academic outcomes: concept inventory and final exam scores. In this study, two sections were taught using lecture format, but one section also completed three group design projects as part of their curriculum. The intervention of incorporating group design projects had a positive effect on mastery goals and a negative effect on performance-approach goals. The effect of the intervention on academic outcomes was mediated by mastery goals but not performance-approach or performance-avoidance goals. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Development of a virtual tool for learning basic organisation and planning in rural engineering projects

This paper presents a virtual lab for the contents of an Engineering project, for designing an agro-industrial building, which is also useful for a range of different transversal courses in Engineering sciences. The aims of this tool are to analyse the most important contents of a project-document (calculation, regulations, drawings and budgets), as well as their relationship with the activities which make up the work and the schedule. The design criteria we considered were: its online applications and their compatibility with Moodle; the inclusion of different learning approaches, such as exploratory learning and inquiry-based learning; its interactivity, and the use of multimedia elements for visualisation and direct analysis on material common to Engineering subjects. The students’ perceptions of the improvements brought by the virtual lab were analysed statistically through a series of questions over two academic years. The results of the questionnaires suggested that most of those who had used the e-learning tool valued positively its overall suitability for reaching the objectives in their subject as well as the way it improved the working methodology. The practical knowledge acquired by the students was also highly valued. In addition, the lack of constraints commonly related to field trips (expenses, time and complexity) illustrates the utility of self-access learning tools in key transversal disciplines such as Engineering projects.     

热能与动力工程专业毕业设计（论文）的改革与实践

北京工业大学热能与动力工程专业着眼于培养本科生的创新精神与实践能力,将本科毕业设计（论文）环节作为重要抓手。通过加强毕业设计（论文）管理的规范化,采取“0．5＋0．5”毕业设计模式,与开放实验室、本科生导师制、组建混合型研究团队、学生科技竞赛等多种途径紧密结合,显著提高了毕业设计（论文）质量。