Maximising academic and social outcomes in engineering education

We are rebalancing engineering education at EUniWell to improve its service to society. Our strategy is to bring together the expertise of Birmingham, Florence, and Linnaeus engineering faculties to maximise the social and academic outcomes of teaching innovation and creativity, communication and networking, and sustainability and responsibility, respectively.

Purpose and Significance

The engineering profession’s distinct cultural identity presents a challenge to develop professional skills as well as scientifically grounded technical skills. It risks negative social outcomes; creating a skills gap between what the world needs and what we teach. Rebalancing engineering education serves the EUniWell mission to promote global and internal well-being.

Implementation Method and Timeline

We’re conducting several activities - skills workshops; intelligence sharing, focus-group discussions; developing pilot materials - to answer the following research questions:

  1. What are the similarities and differences between engineering partners, their student bodies, teaching, programme structures, and institution culture?
  2. How are the skills currently taught and embedded in programmes? What are student attitudes to learning these? How do we currently define and measure social outcomes?
  3. Which new approaches can we employ to better teach these skills that deliver better social and academic outcomes?

Milestones:

  • September 2022: Position paper.
  • December 2022: Workshop at Birmingham on sustainability and responsibility.
  • February 2023: Workshop at Florence on communications and networking.
  • June 2023: Workshop at Linnaeus on teaching innovation and creativity
  • March 2023: Interim project report.
  • September 2023: Final workshop Birmingham.

Expected Outcomes

A set of case-studies on best-practice; findings on engineering students’ attitudes and motivations around learning transversal skills in the EUniWell institutions; how we can measure and assess social outcomes alongside academic outcomes; pilot teaching resources and publications/media.

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