Infrastructure

Infrastructure

The facilities available for university learning go beyond physical spaces - classrooms and laboratories for formal teaching, with libraries and lawns for self-study and informal learning. Increasingly the physical and online learning spaces are merging, with use of online tools and resources in the classroom, campus wireless access, the Library present online as well as being a physical study space with print materials.

The learning spaces and technologies we use shape, and are shaped by the discipline knowledge (curriculum and course design) and the learning and activities and processes that take place in them.

The Faculty aims to:

  • Create new design studio and collaborative learning facilities

  • Develop and improve informal spaces for individual and group learning

  • Expand the range of web-based learning technologies and actively develop our expertise in their use for engineering education

Spaces &Technologies for Design & Collaboration

Design@Eng

In December 2009 the Faculty opened a new flexible studio space Design@Eng. The space has facilities to support multidisciplinary design projects, for undergraduate and postgraduate students.

See www.design.unsw.edu.au/ for some examples of interdisciplinary design work involving UNSW Engineering students.

Mobile technology in the classroom

The Faculty has 100 iPod touches, which have been used for classroom voting in Civil Engineering and Mechatronics classes. Other courses are now beginning to try them out. Whereas clickers are a single-purpose device using special software, iPods can be used for a number of different types of classroom interaction. Classroom voting with iPods uses a web service that also supports input from mobile phone sms or from a laptop. So the iPods are only needed for those students who have neither device with them.

The same technology can be used for peer marking of presentations. The 4th year Mechanical Engineering Design project course has students vote on each others’ presentations in an exercise appropriately named the ‘bear pit’, where they learn how to present and defend their team design proposals. The live feedback is displayed to them immediately following their presentation, showing them real time (anonymous) peer evaluations of their presentation skills.

We have also developed our own iPod application for more formal marking processes, there is a need for recording each marker’s judgement using a rubric for the various criteria and levels of performance. This has been piloted with 4th year thesis presentations in Mechanical Engineering and was also used for this year's for postgraduate research student poster judging.

The iPods have also been used as test devices in Computer Science, for a course in application development. 

For more information contact John Paul Posada (jp.posada@unsw.edu.au).

Informal Learning Spaces

UNSW has a number of campus spaces where students can meet and work informally. Engineering students will also benefit from a program of new building and refurbishment over 2010-2012.

Work has already started on the new $125M Tyree Energy Technologies Building (TETB) due for completion in 2012, which will add new space for informal as well as formal student activity.

Learning and teaching online

In UNSW there is an institutional online learning environments that is integrated with student administration (enrolments and student records) and library (information repository) systems. The use of online learning management systems such as BlackBoard and Moodle can support both formal and informal interactions among students and teachers. Different ways of using the online learning environment are:

  • web-supplemented mode, where the main learning activities and assessment takes place in the classroom and additional resources and information are provided online, but where it is still possible to study the course without using the online environment

  • web-dependent mode, where the students are required to use the online environment for some aspects of their study (e.g. assignments must be submitted online)

  • mixed-mode, where the online environment is essential for core learning activities, such as online tutorial discussions or group work and assessment, and where there is also some face- to-face teaching (In distance study, for example, mixed mode study might consist of online learning activities combined with a requirement to attend a residential school and attend to sit a written examination.)

  • fully online, where learning activities and interactions are entirely online. Some fully online learning involves individual self- paced study. In other types of fully online learning students interact with tutors and with each other entirely in the online environment.

The term blended learning is often used to refer to web-dependent and mixed- mode learning, where digital online media are used alongside classroom learning activities. Within a course, blended learning design involves study in which classroom and online activities are intended to complement each other - as in this course.

Some online learning activities and teaching methods are well proven - and there is scope for expanding their use in mainstream engineering education within UNSW. For example, the online environment has proved invaluable for managing large classes doing project-based courses in teams, such as ENGG1000.