| Popis: |
Multidisciplinary Engineering Education (MEE) is a specialist department at the University of Sheffield, dedicated to the practical teaching of all the University’s engineering students. To deliver this, MEE has a unique building comprising workshops, study spaces, and most importantly 16 laboratories offering a spectrum of lab activities to a population of approximately 4000 students. Effectively managing our resources (staff, equipment, lab space) is challenging due to the heavy demand of student numbers, but an effective approach allows at-scale teaching while ensuring the institutional vision of teaching excellence. This paper presents the approaches used to optimise the “Cantilever Truss” activity, taking place in the MEE Structures Lab. Over the last 5 years, several key stakeholders helped develop this activity’s efficiency and scalability which include academics, technicians, MEE’s timetabling manager and teaching assistants. The key factors in developing the activity were; tuning the learning outcomes for transferability across 3 major courses, optimising the activity tasks for constructive alignment, cross-departmental timetable management, and specialised training for the teaching assistants. The improvements are measured by several teaching design parameters (teaching hours, student numbers, lab “up-time”, cross-disciplinarity), and considered alongside information gathered from teacher reflection forms as well as informal student feedback. This paper discusses how the approaches used have yielded value in optimisation and improvement, before suggesting general elements that could be useful ‘take-aways’ for different contexts and institutions. |
