By Professor Stephen Beck
The Director of the Centre for Engineering Education, Professor Stephen Beck shares his vision, ideas and plans for the future of Engineering Education at The University of Sheffield.
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At Sheffield, in the Faculty of Engineering, we employ around 40 teaching focused academics, including 5 professors, and carry out sector leading teaching and educational activities. The National Student Survey results from our courses put us among the best in the country. Despite these successes, our efforts have been disparate, and we have lacked the reputation and a strategic approach that would allow us to showcase our potential, and to be known as a centre of excellent engineering education.
To address this, over the past year or so, we have set up the Centre for Engineering Education to allow agglomeration of our education activities under a single banner. The Centre for Engineering Education is built upon three pillars, the first of which is community. Instead of having three or four teaching focused staff in each new engineering School, we have created networks where all staff who are interested in developing their teaching (be they teaching focused, or employed on research and teaching contracts, are technical or professional services staff), can meet and exchange ideas and best practice, and form a community. The community includes an active and healthy scholarship group that develop ideas and support the creation of a wide range of outputs. Targeted financial support from the Centre allows sharing of impactful scholarship and educational research at conferences.
For about a decade, the Faculty of Engineering has run regular Education and Teaching Shorts (EATS) sessions where people present their educational work and ideas. EATS are the second pillar, and are an access point to the world of education scholarship, a place to exchange and develop ideas. They are a platform to which CEE can invite external speakers, as well as a forum in which to practise conference presentations and develop workshop activities.
The final pillar of CEE is mentoring for staff who teach. Through mentoring we can support new academics and provide a route for feedback on teaching, educational development and assessment planning. We can help staff plan activities that align with the University’s promotion framework and support career development, and by doing so promote a virtuous cycle of building academic profiles through external recognition via networks and invited talks.
The pillars of community, EATS and mentoring support the primary aim of the Centre for Engineering Education which is to benefit students by enhancing their experience of education at the University of Sheffield by working together and applying best practice. An example initiative is Programme Level Assessment (PLA), which is intended to effectively integrate each course and make it easier for students to bring together theory, practice, design, experimentation and testing. More practical activities have been built into our courses, leveraging the applied and hands-on nature of the discipline, and creating a structure from which other learning can be built around. The outcome of these initiatives is Sheffield graduate engineers who have a clear identity and the experience and knowledge that high calibre employers seek.
By using the Centre of Engineering Education to publicise our work, we will create a halo effect that will attract students to our courses and staff looking for a dynamic place to work. Our peers will find it easy to collaborate with us and we will be a source for speakers, education experts and external examiners. In this way, the Centre appears to be all things to all people. The overarching idea is to improve teaching and therefore the student experience through the pillars of community, EATS and mentoring by supporting staff to be better, more efficient and effective teachers. The Centre will promote our Faculty, our staff, our students and itself. We believe that we do incredible teaching and we have excellent students, our mission is to give staff the confidence and belief they need to share these with the sector leaders in Engineering Education and beyond.