Jane Pritchard - Presentation: Eng Subject Center (UK)

Talked about the structure and budget of the programmes.

They had spent a lot of effort on their web site and resources

Fund mini-projects, 5k EUR per project

Teaching Awards: Get staff out to education related conferences in Eng. Education.
Student Awards: Get students to give their opinions about what is happening in the education.

Recent projects included (E-learning, Aero/Auto, Hertfordshire). Which was about collecting, marking and giving feedback for weekly assessment of tasks for individual students.

Peter Gates advocates mandating that projects demonstrate they have improved learning outcomes for students. This generated some discussion about how that is implemented and how we support investigators. Also the tradeoff between encouraging people to engage in inovation vs scaring them away with requirements for evaluation. Arnold wonders about mandating a standardised approach to evaluation of project outcomes for learners, does this really encourage inovative thinking.

Professional Development

Not clear what is discipline specific, much is the same for all disciplines in terms of what teaching staff need. Credibility of claims makers, what gives someone a right to make a claim about learning.
Advocates short intensive courses, 2-3 days, which focus on skills development.

Ethics

Based in Leeds, works on placing ethics into the curricula.

The future

• Support for new lectures, more coordinated support
• Part time teaching staff, hard to reach, they don't have access to support to develop themselves.
• Ed. Development Units, work with, not against, how does one effectively liase with them.
• Build capacity in Eng Ed research, work with, not just hand out money. Obsessed with teaching, not looking enough at student learning. PROACTIVE

NOTE: was interested and positive about threshold concepts.

Some Links:

Peer Assessment Support System
Subject Center Website
Engineering Education Conference