Engineering education – Teaching & Learning Research Initiative

Reengineering an engineering course: How flipped classrooms afford transformative teaching, learning, and workplace competency

Introduction Successful engineering graduates need to understand engineering principles and practices and be able to work in teams, to communicate well, and to work in contexts that can be risky and uncertain (Adamson & DarlingHammond, 2012; Meier, Williams, & Humphreys, 2000). Current trends in engineering education call for the development of students’ technical and non-technical skills (Male, 2010). Thus, it is crucial that tertiary educators develop curricula that enable students to develop these capacities and to enhance their employability and contribution to a country’s economic competitiveness and societal wellbeing (Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2014). This project extends our previous research on the effectiveness of

Understanding and enhancing learning communities in tertiary education in science and engineering

1. Introduction The impetus for this project grew out of our involvement in tertiary teaching in science and engineering courses. Our own experiences in undergraduate and graduate science papers, and preservice science and technology education papers, had led us to debate the learning experiences of our students. We intuitively felt that there was something lacking in those experiences and wondered about the sense of identity that these students developed through their involvement in these papers. Research by one of the project’s team members (Eames & Bell, 2005) indicated that the learning environment in science and engineering in a university setting was quite different to that experienced in a science and engineering