Transforming the monologue - engineering management into practice

Abstract

Engineering Management and Professional Practice is a compulsory final year course taught in The School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Adelaide. It covers, what may best be described as, the ‘essential non-engineering’ subjects of an engineer’s professional practice and includes topics such as law, risk analysis, marketing and project management. However, student feedback revealed that the lectures (presented by industry experts) were, on the whole, perceived by students to be dull, uninspiring and were consequently very poorly attended. The delivery of the course was therefore radically changed to a project based learning format that offered a clear engineering and vocational relevance to the students. An imaginary large-scale industrial project, with strong and very obvious similarities to a local high-profile company, was described to the students in precise detail. The script of project was deliberately rife with problems that related to industrial law, risk analysis, marketing and project management. Student teams role played and the recommended approaches for solving these problems became the focus of the visiting experts’ revised interactive lectures. It became immediately apparent that interest in the course had increased dramatically. While these convincing initial observations are only qualitative, an ongoing study aims to provide a more quantitative and comprehensive evaluation of the improvement in the students’ learning outcomes