A seminar on 29th June at the University of Birmingham looks at the outcomes of 2 Midlands based projects (one with Loughborough as a partner) which have addressed these topics.

• Research Director Dr Robin Mellors-Bourne will share key findings on why many STEM graduates do not enter careers related to their degree, when at the same time STEM employers report difficulty in recruiting graduates with the skills they require.
• Professor Helen Atkinson, President UK Engineering Professors’ Council, and Head of Department-Elect, University of Leicester will share findings of her Midlands based study investigating key issues that may have impeded employment of Engineers at graduate level.

http://www.hestem-mea.org.uk/events/stem-graduates-for-stem-industri/

The latest offering from the National HE STEM Programme is an ‘engineering rap’ song from the Science communicator Jon Chase. Could this be built into future institutional marketing materials? Check it out on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX_OM8e2Y0w

This event is due to take place on 11th June 2012 from 10:45 – 14:00 in the Keith Green Building, Loughborough University.

Curriculum Enhancement and Innovation: A showcase of National HE STEM Programme activity at Loughborough University

A workshop for Engineering and Design Educators, to be held by the Centre for Engineering and Design Education at Loughborough University as part of the Centre’s EDEN (Engineering and Design Educators Network) seminar series.  (Focusing on learning and teaching issues from an engineering and design perspective, EDEN is intended to provide practitioners with the opportunity to share and develop good practice.) Eight separate projects have been funded at Loughborough University by the National HE STEM Programme in the areas of Curriculum Enhancement and Innovation; Employability Skills; and Pedagogies and Assessment.  With speakers drawn from these projects, the workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to learn about and discuss the implications of these innovative activities and to network with engineering and design educators from both Loughborough and other institutions.

To register online please visit: http://edenseminar3.eventbrite.co.uk/

We were thrilled to receive abstracts for over 100 papers and workshops for the conference and the deadline for submission of full papers and workshop outlines is fast approaching.  It promises to be an invigorating and stimulating conference if the papers match up to expectations!

Quotes from attendees at earlier conferences:

“Excellent opportunity to network, exchange ideas and familiarise with pedagogy theory”

“…a refreshing and an inspiring conference covering a comprehensive range of topics addressing the current issues in Engineering Education”

Registration for the conference will open shortly – check the conference website for details.

The e-mentoring pilot scheme, headed by Professor Simon Austin, links students with construction professionals according to interest and career path to provide the principles of traditional mentoring but exploiting the free and readily available technologies of Skype, social media and e-mail to foster the awareness of professional practice and the needs of employers. This is an excellent example of harnessing the energy: with mentors using their time and energy to harness and refine the energy of their mentees providing them with important experience of industry.

The S-Lab Awards scheme is a central component of the fresh initiative set up by the Safe, Successful and Sustainable Laboratories organisation who will be hosting their first national conference at York’s National Science Learning Centre in June. In their own words: “[t]he S-Lab programme aims to create more sustainable laboratories, and to raise sustainability awareness amongst lab-using staff and students.” With one of the key premises of Kit-Catalogue residing on the environmental benefits of sharing laboratory equipment between different departments within an institution, we believe that Kit-Catalogue presents a strong case in contention for this award. We will also be presenting at the conference, so preparations for this are well under way.

In other news, we are planning to run a stall at the Environment Day event here at Loughborough University in May. As a significant event in the University’s calendar, this will be a chance to inform and promote the use of Kit-Catalogue to a wide-range of attendees from internal staff, students and researchers to external business and guests, all with an avid focus upon the sustainable benefits of utilising Kit-Catalogue.

Right, now I’d best get back to testing the new software; we want it absolutely flawless for the release, so please bear with me until my next post. If you really can’t wait until then (unlikely), then you can also follow Kit-Catalogue activity by checking Twitter for the #kitcatalogue tag, where we’ll be posting updates and news as and when it arises.

The SLTN offers at least one conference per year in addition to other events and workshops. Committee members include students, recent graduates, researchers and student interns; new members are recruited each summer to ensure there is a smooth transition of expertise. It also provides information via blogs, case studies, articles and online forums. The SLTN do not represent the student voice but promote students as valid and active members of learning communities.

Look out for future events – they are interesting and informative.

When I began my job as the Resource Development Assistant for Kit-Catalogue I knew little more than the basic outlines for government spending cuts to universities and research institutions, and held only superstitious inflections about the way technicians protected their equipment. I merely thought that any attempt to promote the sharing of equipment was completely worthwhile, environmentally friendly and an effective measure to counter the effects of the spending cuts. However, it wasn’t long until I realised that there’s much more involved in the process of equipment sharing.

This all became apparent after I dispelled my premonitions and visited a few technicians to talk to them about the Kit-Catalogue and equipment sharing. Immediately, it was clear that the process for equipment sharing was a controversial subject with some technicians absolutely in favour of the project, and others doubtfully hesitant of its success. Whilst any form of inter-institutional equipment sharing looks useful theoretically–why buy a mass spectrometer when another department has one?–in practice, there are a number of complications that could hinder the basic principle and prevent an equipment sharing system from working. Concerns I came across ranged from aversions to letting certain equipment out to certain types of user through to fears of email bombardment with verbose requests to use items. There were several more but summarily, all of the concerns simmer down to how much control technicians hold of their items when they are put online into a database for sharing.

However, this is where Kit-Catalogue is superior to other equipment sharing databases because it is being developed with a firm consciousness of the needs of both the requester and the owner. Clearly displayed user restrictions, availability information, essential training and even selective visibility are all features being developed in the next version of Kit-Catalogue software. These fields will fall under the responsibility of the custodian to declare, enabling them to maintain complete autonomy over access to their items–something which was only partially in place before. From these fields, the user should know whether they could use an item before they contact custodians and this certainly should reduce a portion of the emails sent to custodians. But what about those dreaded ‘verbose’ email requests you ask? Well, we’re developing a concise form for users to fill in that will provide enough information for the technician to assess the suitability of the requester for using the item without being at all demanding of the requester’s time. These features combined will make the whole sharing process much more efficient for both custodians and requesters, promoting the necessity to use Kit-Catalogue as a productive means of equipment sharing across institutions.

I’ve barely covered half of what I have to say about Kit-Catalogue, especially with regards to the environmental benefits of using the system. However, upon second thoughts as I write this, I feel as though the sustainable aspect of Kit-Catalogue deserves its own post. So, for now, I’ll leave it at that and sign off, leaving the door open for my next instalment.

Sharing information on research equipment is a very big issue in HEI’s in the UK at the moment and Loughborough’s Kit-Catalogue tool is gaining a great deal of interest.  We’ve had downloads by many HEI’s and have been talking with Southampton, Bath and Leeds on issues around the standardisation of information that describes equipment as well as using open standards to describe the data (e.g. CERIF), interoperable ways of sharing the data and classifications or taxonomies that best describe the category of equipment.

If your institution is interested trying out Kit-Cataloguing, the JISC has just announced that up to £15k is available under their ‘Transformations Programme‘  to help institutions move towards organisational change through the application of existing JISC and other resources (deadline is mid-April).  Please get in touch if you are interested in bidding to this fund and we can see if we can cost in some of our time to support you!

These practical activity based workshops provide delegates with the opportunity to share ideas and experiences with colleagues from across the UK. The programme covered a range of topics relevant to teaching undergraduate engineering students including designing modules and assessing engineering students. There was also the opportunity to learn more about the resources available from the Centre for Engineering and Design Education (incorporating the HEA Engineering Subject Centre and engCETL) and how the Centre can support delegates in their teaching.

The programme included: Approaches to teaching engineering, Assessment and feedback, Re-capturing the lecture, Personal Tutoring and accessibility, Design for learning in engineering and Evaluating the student learning experience.

Delegates commented, ‘this workshop put me on the right track’, ‘ gave me a better understanding of how engineering courses are assessed and evaluated’ and ‘made me aware of the resources available’.

Feedback from the session was positive, with participants rating the event as good or excellent. Comments included • The most useful thing I learnt was a “new idea to engage students”. • The most useful thing I learnt was a “the ease of video making, lack of technical facilities required”. • What I might do differently in the future is “try this approach”. • What I might do differently in the future is “integrate video assessment into module(s) next

I am currently planning the next EDEN seminar, which is to run in the middle of March. If you would like to informed of future EDEN seminars, please email me (s.e.bamforth@lboro.ac.uk)

Kit-Catalogue is an open source equipment database system and by using the catalogue within their own institutions, organisations will be able to work towards more efficiency, utilising the assets already in existence and lessening the need for duplication of material assets to become a more sustainable campus.  Benefits include:

• reduced need for heating and occupation of additional space within buildings for duplicated equipment;
• avoids unnecessary purchasing, manufacturing and shipping of products;
• maximises opportunity for use of specialist equipment locally by research students, departments and schools;
• potential to promote equipment use externally to regional HEIs, industry and Small to Medium Enterprises (SME).

Download the Kit-Catalogue system here.

The project has benefited from a significant amount of continuation funding from Loughborough University, December 2011 – Juy 2012, (for an internship position, system developer and marketing and support specialists) to continue to develop the current system and support the implementation at any interested UK Higher Education Institutions.  The project is also following links with JISC Procureweb to explore joining up catalogues in the UK HE sector.

If you are interested in getting involved, please contact us at: kit-catalogue@lboro.ac.uk.  We hope to go out and demonstrate the system as widely as possible and plan an open event for potential adopters some time in Spring 2012.

The JISC funding gave the system a massive boost in terms of momentum of adding items to the catalogue within our own institution and opened up talks with senior managers on our staff’s attitude and Institutional culture on the re-use and sharing of equipment.  The project was very lucky to have an extremely effective steering group comprising of representatives from academia, administration, IT Services, Operations and Senior Management.

The project also allowed our Institution to explore the idea of open linked data with our IT Services and sowed the seed of activity in this emerging innovative area of web development and generally the culture of open access to data.

The most unexpected occurrence has been the amount of interest in our Project from many diverse groups of people, from Research groups and RCUK, to purchasing and asset management organisations as well as a great deal of interest from the Midlands 5 group of universities (Leicester, Nottingham, Warwick, Birmingham and Loughborough).  This has had both positive (from a project perspective) and challenging (from a time perspective) impacts.  Because of this, the team has had more meetings with our own Research committees, Marketing, Publicity and the Enterprise office – which has led to more briefing materials being produced, trademark applications and lots of conversations with our commercialisation people about the difference between open source and commercial software for example.

However, from the momentum achieved and the interest the Project has garnered, the University has committed to invest in the project further and Prof Rachel Thomson has successfully bid for a further amount of money to continue with Kit-Catalogue for 9 months and sustain the project.   The system will now reside as a corporate application within our central IT Services (rather than on our Faculty Engineering server) and as such, given the additional resources required to sustain it in the long term.  This demonstrates Loughborough’s continued commitment to this work.

A special issue on the theme of student engagement, this issue has been guest-edited by Dr Daphne O’Doherty of Cardiff University  and ‘showcases a range of papers that cover various aspects of improving student engagement by reporting on a diverse set of initiatives taken at various universities in the UK and Germany.’

It has been a privilege to work with Daphne and all of the contributors to this special issue and I am already looking forward to vol 7, issue 1 (for which submission is now closed).

At the meeting we discussed the initial findings of the interviews undertaken with unemployed students and employers. Findings are by no means certain yet but a lack of relevant work experience appears to be a major factor to not finding employment – no real surprise there with all of the recent publications in this area. More interesting was the perceived impact the unemployed graduates put on not having an MEng. Employers also raised the MEng as a possibly increasingly important factor with the onset of student fees. So, it is going to be interesting to see if further research confirms these findings.

Key areas covered were: Sharing existing practice, Exploring the role of the Demonstrator, Managing expectations, Dealing with difficult situations, Marking laboratory scripts and assessing students.

Delegates reported that the event was ‘an excellent all-round great success’ and encouraged the Centre to ‘keep the good work up with some more knowledgeable seminars’.

This international conference is dedicated to enhancing the quality of higher education in all engineering disciplines. It will serve as a forum for sharing innovation and effective practice and will provide delegates with the opportunity to critically and creatively engage with new ideas and research.

For more information please visit: http://cede.lboro.ac.uk/ee2012/

The course was very well structured the pace was just right and the balance between lecturing and working on chosen examples from the lecture notes was perfect. My maths and physics is rusty, but morning sessions explained both the theory (the physics) and the mathematics behind the computation calmly and clearly and we were given just the right amount of time with the lecturer to work through examples to understand principles.

The afternoon sessions were maybe more challenging to me (although the other students seemed more at ease – and indeed faster). The sessions were organised into a series of progressive tasks which built on the complexity of the building model we were developing.

The days I did attend the course were a marvellous insight into IES and Building Energy Modelling principles, it was well communicated, easy to understand and I came away with a grasp of the software the application and limitation to work on further research project outputs.

Dear Colleagues

The organising committee of the 8th International Design & Emotion Conference, London, 11th-14th September 2012, is very pleased to invite you to participate in this conference.

This conference is a forum held every other year where practitioners, academics and industry leaders meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion.

We are looking for researchers, academics and practitioners to submit proposals for the following:

1) Paper Submissions

Full Papers are expected to contribute widely applicable long-lasting knowledge to the discipline. Accepted papers will be presented in the conference programme and published in the proceedings. The paper length is a maximum of 12 pages (approximately 4,000-5,000 words plus figures and tables) in the specified format, which will be detailed on the website (including a template).

Short Papers (Posters) are expected to describe research that is more appropriate for the interactive poster session. The paper length should be a maximum of 5 pages (approximately 2,000 words plus figures and tables) and an additional page containing a full-page image of the poster in the specified format for the publication in the conference proceedings. The first submission requires a short paper manuscript without the poster page.

2) Case Studies

Case studies are invited for submission to present design projects that address issues and insights in design and emotion, or to communicate and discuss your approach to enhance emotional effects. These must include a summary description in a maximum of 5 pages (approximately 2,000 words) in the specified format and a maximum of 30 slides illustrating the design, design process and use.

3) Workshops & Masterclasses

Workshops & Masterclasses of either a full or half-day will be held on 11th September 2012 prior to the main programme of the conference. The purpose is to provide a platform for presenting and discussing novel ideas and emerging issues in a less formal way than the conference itself. The format of each workshop/masterclass is to be determined by its organiser, but each one is expected to include ample time for general discussion.

While Design & Emotion is the overarching focus of the conference—allowing us to consider all aspects of the relationship between human experience and design understood in its widest senses—the theme this year is “Out of Control”.

For a number of years, uncertainty, crisis and chaos have been keywords describing the experience of many of us. A world driven by uncertainty, crisis and chaos demands different responses from design (as a community, a practice and a process). On one hand we can mitigate against these—designing systems which can withstand, or manage, the challenges they produce. Here there is a focus upon design as a “problem-solving” activity. On the other, we can use them as springboards to a creative future. In this way, design as “opportunity mapping” becomes important.

We would like to encompass both of these approaches to design and to examine how they impact upon, or are generated by, the whole spectrum of human emotion experienced at the macro (socio-cultural), micro (personal), meta (philosophical), processural (methodological) and strategic levels.

This conference is open to any theoretical, empirical or methodological work on Design & Emotion and we are particularly interested in receiving papers from researchers, academics and practitioners in the following topic areas (though they are by no means exhaustive and other work relevant to the theme will be considered):

Submission and review processes will be handled by our conference system. All submissions will go through a blind-review process with at least two reviewers considering each proposal. All submissions accepted in the second review will be asked to submit the final manuscripts in the camera-ready format. The detailed authoring guideline will be available on the conference website.

Contact Details

Please direct all enquiries to the following:

de2012@csm.arts.ac.uk

Organising Committee

Dr Jamie Brassett (CSM) Prof Janet McDonnell (CSM) Prof Paul Hekkert (D&E) Dr Geke Ludden (D&E) Jeroen van Erp (D&E)

Design education for future wellbeing - The 14th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education (E&PDE2012) – Artesis University College, Antwerp, Belgium.  6-7th September 2012.  The call for abstracts is now open.  Abstract deadline is 3rd December 2011.  For more information on the conference and its aims please use the link below.

http://www.iepde.org/epde12/index.html

International Conference on Information Technologies – 2012 – 21st Conference in the series sponsored by the International Network for Engineering Education and Research (iNEER) – The Saratov State Technical University in Saratove, Russia. 6-9th June 2012. The call for abstracts is now open.  Abstract deadline is the 20th December 2011.  More conference information can be found at:

http://icit12.sstu.ru/ocs/index.php/icit/icit12

Fiona and Glynis were also formally notified that they have been successful in their bid to HE STEM to be ‘Practice Transfer Custodians’. This means that other institutions can bid to adopt our successful student-led activities and become ‘ Practice Transfer Adopters’.

Malcolm, Glynis and Andrea will be attending the cluster group meeting (Melanie is on annual leave) and we will update you on our progress.  Everything is going well, we have nearly completed the Development Phase – this is the ICT developments and are just starting work package 5 which is the implementation stage. Andrea will be taking hold of the reins for work package 6 which evaluates the measures we have implemented.

A key finding of the PhD was that differences in the language used to identify design representations by industrial designers and engineering designers was impeding communication and a taxonomy of sketches, drawings, models and prototypes was generated to help improve this situation. The taxonomy is a significant feature of CoLab and the use of carefully selected images has been devised to facilitate understanding of the activities of new product development with the intention of promoting engineering as a programme of study and career choice.

The PhD also identified differences in the ways in which industrial designers and engineering designer use design representation and, having validated the taxonomy, this was then used to collect data to identify how design representations were used by the two groups during four stages of new product development; and which design representations were used to communicate 10 types of design information and 8 types of technical information. This data was collected following interviews with practitioners in the UK and Singapore and presented in rank order as percentage of use by those interviewed i.e. the most popular appears at the top of the list.

The key features of the CoLab design tool are that it identifies:

- The design representations used by industrial designers and engineering designers during four stages of NPD - The design representations used by industrial designers and engineering designers to communicate types of design information and technical information - A taxonomy of 35 design representations grouped into sketches, drawings, models and prototypes

Cataloguing Loughborough’s Equipment

As Melanie recently mentioned, our summer placement students have come to the end of their time with us.  They may have only been with us for a short time, but they’ve managed to access and catalogue a tremendous amount of equipment, and around 6-700 items of new equipment have been added to our database.  Some areas of the university did escape the cataloguing effort, as they are having extensive renovations ready for the new academic year.  These should be supplying their own equipment details in due course, so the catalogue is set to expand even further.

Institutional Take-up

Prof. Rachel Thomson, a key member of our project steering group, has had high-level discussions with several universities about using Kit-Catalogue at their institution.  Early contact with these institutions has provided the opportunity for them to feed extra information and requirements in to the mix, and by having these discussions early in the development process, we think we’ll develop a stronger system, and better ensure sucessful deployments.

Software Development

For my part, a recent bout of illness and associated time off has put me a few weeks behind with the coding schedule, though I’m hoping to get back on track and have an early release of the system ready soon.

I’m currently working hard on completing the administrative interface for the system, and trying to incorporate the different requirements and options that have been suggested by some of the other institutions we’ve spoken with.

Watch this space, and we’ll hopefully have some more news soon!

Russell Stannard, the author, is a Principle teaching fellow at the University of Warwick and has won multiple awards for his teaching resources which are designed for teachers. Russell creates the website resources himself and puts the tools into action in his teaching. If you’ve been to some e-learning related conferences in the last couple of years you may well have come across Russell.

You can subscribe to the website for a monthly update – a frequency which is not too often to never open, but contains just enough information to keep you interested and possibly look into one or two of the videos included. It also means you don’t have to remember to go to the site to have a look around.

Thoroughly recommended.

If anyone within the 5 CEDE Schools would be interested to know more about their use and/or would like to consider trialling their use then please get in touch with us.

This latest issue includes: 2011 Teaching Awards, a review of the Celebrating Excellence in Engineering Education and much much more.

‘Doing Pedagocical Research in Engineering’ by George Brown and Sarah Edmunds helps and encourage colleagues in engineering academia and industry to do research on the diverse forms of learning, assessment and teaching so that they and future generations of colleagues are better equipped to meet the challenges ahead in undergraduate education and the continuing professional development of engineers.

The authors have designed relatively brief units of study: many if these can each be read in a half hour. They write in a clear, sometimes humorous way, and they provide practical suggestions, activities which develop understanding of the research methods and, at the end of the book, brief discussions of the activities. The book may not yet be part of an open learning module but it does open the pathway to learning about pedagogical research in engineering. 

This publication will be diseminated through the Centre over the coming months.

James, Ruth, Hannah and Tobi

Here’s a photo of them posing at the Materials Research School poster competition event where they presented their work on Kit-Catalogue.

It has been incredibly important to have them working with us as their advocacy en masse to each department has really helped spread the word.  Although there have been a few instances of skepticism about the reasons for cataloguing equipment, and the culture of opening up information and access to bits of kit, attitudes are starting to change.  The top down requirement, from the PVC(R) and research office to get on board with the project in conjunction with the additional 4 pairs of hands from the students have helped to make a significant difference to the momentum of the project.

Prof Rachel Thomson has also been busy advocating the system to the EPSRC as well as our regional institutions.  The ‘soft release’ of the system is hoped to be made to a few interested parties in the week commencing 19th September, so that initial installation bugs can be ironed out.  We are aiming for a full release by the end of October to the community.

We have worked with the Library systems team, for example, on accessing both staff and student data on the borrowing of items from the library catalogue and access to books found on a the reading lists associated with their modules.  Loughborough uses the open source LORLS system (developed by the library systems team) which has just had a new release.  As part of the developments for our project, the team has worked on a library API for the library systems (including LORLS) which allows other applications to make requests for this information based on staff ID or student ID.  It’s an exciting step and the API is now up and running ready for external applications to utilise.  I intend to develop a page for the Co-Tutor system in the coming weeks, so that tutors can easily see a snapshot of this information throughout the year.

I also met with colleagues from the E-Learning Systems team and networks team in IT Services, the Student Information manager in the Registry, the Head of E-Learning, Chair of the E-Learning Advisory group, Head of Student Services and several academics on the topic of using the VLE and the Attendant system for ‘engagement monitoring’.  Some very useful and interesting items came up such as; it is preferable to monitor engagement at a Programme level rather than module level; activity logs within Moodle are too detailed at present and need some form of rationalising to make it useful for tutors; student activity with the VLE must be linked to staff activity on a module and student activity must be in the context of the cohorts activity in general for that module (likewise for attendance); different sessions require different monitoring e.g. some sessions and resources are more critical than others so automated emails etc need to take into account that fact; showing the information back to the students as well as staff would be useful; Student Services would like to be alerted sooner rather than later about a struggling student; confidentiality clauses are different within different Schools for the disclosure of certain information; would it also be right/ethical to check whether a student had been accessing emails or not?

As a result of these meetings and the research work done, developments have been planned to Co-Tutor, the attendance monitoring system and LEARN (moodle).  In the coming months, tutors should have a much richer picture of their students engagement!

We will continue to support the 4 engineering Schools and the Loughborough Design School, as well as many transition activities for the HEA and engSC.  Along with the many HE STEM projects we are also involved in and the two JISC projects ‘Kit-Catalogue‘ and ‘Pedestal for Progression‘ we’ll certainly have a busy year to look forward to.

• outreach: chairs 2010
• outreach: sit on school advisory boards
• discussion: the responsibility of engineers for sustainability
• activity: extend the design competition idea to rest of schools or even international
• activity: revisit living labs (jamie.goggins@nuigalway.ie)
• EE2012: have strand which is about building on previously published work
• Civil: dam simulation game (David Scott)
• EDEN: peer observation of teaching (Reena Cole, Limerick)
• Placements: mock placement application procedure (Anne Nortcliffe, SHU, EngSC Associate, paper 50)
• follow up: Vision 2030 (Bob Warrington); voluntary activity (Renata Engel) 
• news: Engineering Toolkit for a Developing World http://www.ice.org.uk/Toolkit. This is an open-source set of materials and ideas to help engineers plan and deliver infrastructure for international development, poverty alleviation and the UN Millenium Development Goals.

A  couple of thoughts from the conference:

• Engineering should be at a level where the community takes responsibility.
• Technology is the key element of most social changes. Globalisation is the result of technological advances. Modern engineering is the key element to allow necessary sustainable developement to society. Engineering education becomes a strategic asset. (Luiz Carlos Scavarda Do Carmo, Brazil)

Highlights from the keynotes included:

Helen Atkinson (EPC, Leicester) detailed case studies for sustainable engineering concluding with desirable attributes for sustainable global engineers. These included being:

• ethical
• holistic systems thinker
• creative and ingenious
• personally engaged
• thinking without borders
• good engineer
• excellent communication and management skills

There is a need to ensure students don’t think it is a ‘soft’ subject, or one that is important but won’t make them rich. Instead that it is a critical challenge, taught alongside the technical material. Read more about the student perspective: http://www.engsc.ac.uk/student-award

Renata Engel (US, Penn State) discussed engineering education as a dynamic system. The inputs and output requirements continually change, therefore the system must change. One of the changes Renata talked about was that incoming US students are now entering used to and with an expecation of volunteering, that we aren’t making the most of this. Another was that we get industry to sit on our advisory boards, but do we sit on enough school advisory boards?

Paul Jowitt (ex Pres ICE) talked about the ICE Engineering Toolkit for a Developing World http://www.ice.org.uk/Toolkit. This is an open-source set of materials and ideas to help engineers plan and deliver infrastructure for international development, poverty alleviation and the UN Millenium Development Goals.

Other papers of interest:

• US – The Vision 2030 task force of ASME (mechanical engineering) are carrying out a large study of engineering education. The drviers for change include: increased professional expectations, new knowledge and blurring of boundaries, change driven by societal need, engineering leadership, global challenges. Needed is innovation, leadership, co-operation, stewardship of environment, sustainable growth. Draft recommendations These findings align well with the recent UK report Engineering Graduates for Industry http://www.engsc.ac.uk/graduates-for-industry (paper 40).
• Finland – focusing on engineers also having the skills to sell their products – Finland has a reputation of producing excellent products, now needs to sell them (paper 239).
• Hungary – 2010 chairs to make a Temporary City exhibit involving undergraduates, the public and school children. It would be great to do something like this in the UK (paper 113). http://www.stadtbaukultur-nrw.de/pdf/publikationen/tempstadt_pecs.pdf
• Ireland – living labs – make your building a tool for sustainable teaching (paper 283).
• UCLAN have a interesting named ‘Futures Unit’ covering employability, careers and enterprise, including international design competitions etc (paper 163).
• Brazil have a deficit of 75,000 engineers. They need to encourage more students to do engineering in the first place – an ‘invisibile’ subject (paper 280).

One pertinent project that we have viewed is: ‘Rethinking Final Year Projects and Dissertations: Creative Honours and Capstone Projects’ This is a two-year HEA funded project that commenced in September 2010. Further details may be viewed at: http://insight.glos.ac.uk/tli/activities/ntf/creativehops/pages/default.aspx

In particular we are scrutinizing minutes from all the staff/ student programme committee meetings that have been held during the 2010/ 2011 academic year in our pilot departments. Items in these documents are corroborating our findings from the student ‘Ideasfest’ events and the meetings with members of staff. We have now identified areas where additions to existing systems could improve aspects of the final year experience for students and streamline activities for staff.

This additional funding will allow us to add a considerable amount of equipment across the University as a whole, building on the ~800 items already in the catalogue.  As part of their work the students will also help to re-catagorise the existing equipment to promote sharing and public viewing of the information in the record.  They will also add to the content of each record to provide a richer experience for end-users, in particular things like instructional videos or ‘how-to’ cheat sheets (which particularly encourage use by undergraduate and postgraduate students whilst doing project work).

We hope that these students will get as much from the experience as we will.  I’ll encourage them to contribute to our project blog too, so that they can share their experiences on attitudes to the greening and sustainability aspects the Kit-Catalogue project.

Also this week, I was extremely pleased to see interest our mailing list from the LabRATS group (University of California Santa Barbara Laboratory Research and Technical Staff), who are interested in the sustainability of laboratories.  It would be great to take on board the experiences and expertise of the community through our mailing list, so we can create a system which can be used widely.  If you’re interested you can join our Kit-Catalogue mailing list here.

These insightful meetings identified areas where different operations could be amalgamated to not only streamline existing processes and view student progression through the early stages of project set-up but also enable students to start on their project laboratory work at an earlier date.

It is interesting that our students, academic staff and technical staff are mentioning similar areas that could be improved.

I submitted the following information about Co-Tutor to the recent call for evidence by the HEA for effective interventions to enhance student retention and success.  It is hopefully soon to be published in the 6th Bi-annual Retention Briefing to be published in July 2011.

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Co-Tutor is a Student and Staff Relationship Management (SSRM) system and is used by academic staff and administrators to communicate with and manage personal tutees, project students, industrial placement activities, postgraduate research supervision and course cohorts.  It is a large PHP/MySQL web application with interfaces to the University’s student information system, attendance monitoring software and the Moodle virtual learning environment (VLE).

Co-Tutor is also used by departmental management to monitor the contact and interaction that staff have with the students; attendance at lectures, tutorials and meetings; as an archive for email communication and used as an invaluable resource after the students have graduated.  Academics can now enter information as free text, pre-defined statements and tags.  As well as comments, Co-Tutor contains important metrics on student welfare, progression and attendance.  For example, it has been used successfully to support academics when students enter claims for impaired performance.

In 2010 we carried out a survey of users.  Over 110 academic responded with the following evidence supporting Co-Tutor’s effectiveness.

• (55/62) 89% reported a positive effect on aiding intervention and early recognition of struggling students. (8/62) 13% reported a dramatic improvement.
• (51/60) 85% reported a positive effect on communication between various tutors and administrators. (6/60) 10% reported a dramatic improvement.
• (47/56) 84% agreed or strongly agreed it helps new members of staff in their tutoring roles.
• (41/53) 77% either agreed or strongly agreed that it helped to provide consistent pastoral care and industrial supervision across the department.

Co-Tutor has recently been awarded a prestigious IMS Global Learning Impact Leadership Award at the Learning Impact Conference (Long Beach, California – May 2010) in the established initiatives category.

We’ve been continuing with our discovery phase by meeting up with administrators in our pilot departments prior to their very busy examination/ post examination period and are now acquiring a wealth of data appertaining to the final year experience.

We are particularly, but not exclusively, interested in investigating areas where further use of technology may save staff and/ or student time, and where any changes implemented will contribute towards enhancing the final year student experience.

Our administrators identified several areas where initiating changes could:

• Streamline activities
• Monitor groups of students
• Enhance project management
• Enhance staff/ student relationships

It is of interest that some of the points raised by our administrators were identical to those identified by students participating in our ‘Ideasfest’.

Institutions are service providers. It is critical to understand that.  Students expect an educational *experience* which will provide a foundation for their future careers.  Staff expect an employer who will support them in becoming exceptional researchers and/or teachers in an increasingly global arena.   I believe the ongoing provision of specialist support for both staff and students – in the areas of learning, teaching and research – is key for an institution in delivering a high quality service to those groups.

It is time to recognise that specialist support staff are not outside the core business of of an institution but they are absolutely at the heart of delivering the change that is required.  As institutions streamline and centralise many processes, often IT is seen as the magic wand that will solve inefficiency and ineffectiveness.  However of course, an IT system is not the solution and quite often causes more pain!

Specialist staff who are capable of delivering change (supported by IT systems) are technologists AND educationalists who are also extremely good with people.  The key to change is supporting academics and students with educationalists who can adopt new ‘service improvement’ approaches with an empathy for their colleagues and an insight into emerging technologies.

It is these services that Institutions need to keep running!

Student journey maps and 'flower of focus' from the Ideasfest workshops

Staff experience is also very important to the project.  Additional information, which will feed into the discovery phase will include; interviews with administrators, technicians, programme directors etc.; from NSS survey results; minutes from staff/student committees within departments; and staff surveys from previous years.  Data we are interested in, for example, is to what extent does using technology have an effect on the perceived quality of the relationships built up by the student and the ‘university’ or tutor or staff in general and what is the balance of automation and human intervention that is required to maximise the perception of a ‘quality relationship’ whilst saving academic time in dealing with large numbers and disparate groups?

All the information collected during this phase will be embodied in a set of user stories, to help the project focus on particular area(s) where improvements to a service can be made.

Now some of this searching functionality will be provided by Google automatically as they start indexing our public pages, and search engines are going to be providing the majority of our third-party visits in the future.  Better still, though, would be a system that could search the catalogue directly, make sense of all the data we hold and provide more relevant searching options.

All of this relies on data, of course, and keen not to reinvent the wheel I set off trying to find any equipment metadata schemas I could co-opt for our purposes.  I mistakenly thought I’d easily find a schema for things like an item’s manufacturer, model, etc, but instead the search has been pretty disappointing so far.  I won’t detail all the sites, specs and schemas I’ve gone through as there’s too many to mention, but the following are the highlights.

The Dublin Core site was one of my first ports of call.  It’s a metadata staple, and the site contains some tantalising mentions of recording the properties of physical objects, I believe with the intention of helping museums store digital representations of physical artifacts.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything useful in the specifications relating to this.  Dublin Core is great for ‘artifacts’ that have a creator/author, and other related concepts, but it doesn’t seem to have anything suitable to fill our requirements.

Existing enterprise asset management systems were another obvious target, and I browsed through sites, looking for data specifications or schema, but with no luck.  Much of the content in this area seems to be on guidelines and rules that will put you on the path to effective asset management.  It’s all well and good, but it doesn’t help me catalogue anything in a linkable way, and most of the interesting looking information was hidden inside proprietory packages anyway.

Through a JISC CETIS/Repositories mailing list, we received a useful tip-off about the CERIF metadata specification.  Developed by euroCRIS and recommended by JISC for recording research information, it covers all aspects of research activity including funding calls, publications, patents, and most importantly for us, research equipment.

The specification as a whole looks pretty comprehensive and it certainly looks like a great basis for a research management system.  The equipment section, however, is a little light on detail for our needs, and essentially consists of name, description and keyword fields.  While this makes CERIF unsuitable for underpinning our catalogue , it may provide a useful output ‘format’ for our API, and offer a means to exchange data with any institutional research management systems that may be running alongside Kit-Catalogue.

So it’s been a fruitless search so far, though I have learned an awful lot about some of the other interesting metadata schemas that now exist out in the wild.  While I’ve not given up all hope just yet, the clock is ticking, and with code developments progressing, it’s probably time to draw a line under the search for now.  If any of you out there have any tips though, please do send them on through!

In the meantime, I think we’ll have to settle for creating our own simple schema that anyone can easily make sense of.  If we do strike schema-gold later on, we can always add it to the Kit-Catalogue API as another output option.

In particular, we are questioning the perceived benefits and barriers to using the system.  This is something Melanie and I have always been interested in – with regards to the adoption of software, systems and technology at institutions – but it’s also important for the project.

One of our primary aims is to maximise the usage of our equipment.  For the Kit-Catalogue system, this means maximising usage of the database – both in terms of the number of people searching for, finding, and hopefully using equipment, but also engaging those staff who take the time to add their equipment to the database itself.  The success of the software will depend on boosting the benefits of using the system, whilst overcoming the barriers putting people off, and it will be interesting to see which benefits and barriers our survey respondents highlight as being most important to them.

Whatever the outcome, this data will shape the future development of the software, and the processes surrounding it.

Following the meeting tomorrow, I’ll report back on some of the outcomes.  One of the to-dos for next week is to sort our website out, which will give us a place to put our outputs and project resources, including blog posts and meeting minutes.  For now, though, this blog is going to be it

Rather than scattering all my posts amongst the various work-related blogs I’ve contributed to over the years, I thought It would be much better to consolidate my thoughts in a single place, and then feed the posts out to other areas through category-filtering.

So, you might see random topic changes on this blog, as different things come and go, but the end result will be a single place to find all my posts!  Hurrah!