Regional Development: New Challenges for Engineering Education (SYNERGY-2021 Conference Results Review)

The article summarizes the results of the plenary session of the international network conference “Regional development: new challenges for engineering education – SYNERGY-2021”, held at Kazan National Research Technological University from October 19 to 20, 2021. The forum which brought together representatives of universities and industrial enterprises of Russia and abroad was devoted to the issue of training engineers for the petrochemical industry. Among the participants were representatives of international societies for engineering education, ten national research universities and seven supporting universities of PJSC Gazprom, state authorities and industrial enterprises of Tatarstan. It was possible to observe the work of the plenary session in real time via the Internet in all the supporting universities of Gazprom. The event was organized by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, the International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP), the Association of Engineering Education of Russia (AIOR), as well as the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Republic of Tatarstan and Kazan National Research Technological University. Gazprom PJSC became the general sponsor. In total, the conference gathered more than 450 participants (380 online and 85 in person) from 40 universities in Russia, the USA, Great Britain, Germany, Portugal, Finland, Poland, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia, Latvia, and Estonia. Representatives of 7 industrial enterprises spoke, 77 reports were made.

The Engineering Pedagogy Evolution: The Foundation and Three Measurements

The status, subject area and structure of engineering pedagogy are still at the center of the academic and scientific community. It develops as a professional pedagogy section, although it tended to be viewed as an educational module, as a field of teacher practical activity. The role of engineering pedagogy in developing engineering thinking should become increasingly important, taking into account the integration processes – inter-disciplinary, inter-subject, trans-professional, and the transformations in the industrial sphere in general and in engineering in particular. The transfer of its accumulated experience and ideas to new application areas can enrich other branches of knowledge with ideas, principles and cognitive approaches. Both methods of acquiring scientific knowledge and heuristic and practical technologies are equally essential for the system of continuous fundamental engineering and technical education development. Engineering pedagogy’s goals revision and clarification lead to a multidimensional space for engineering thinking development, including training of engineering educators for a lifelong learning system. Based on the general foundations and laws of pedagogy, three measurements of engineering pedagogy enable to reveal its interdisciplinary strategy in different subject areas. Engineering pedagogy can participate in various formats– as teacher training technology both for school and university teachers.

Designing for Framing in Online Teacher Education: Supporting Teachers’ Attending to Student Thinking in Video Discussions of Classroom Engineering

Participating in discussions of classroom video can support teachers to attend to student thinking. Central to the success of these discussions is how teachers interpret the activity they are engaged in—how teachers frame what they are doing. In asynchronous online environments, negotiating framing poses challenges, given that interactions are not in real time and often require written text. We present findings from an online course designed to support teachers to frame video discussions as making sense of student thinking. In an engineering pedagogy course designed to emphasize responsiveness to students’ thinking, we documented shifts in teachers’ framing, with teachers more frequently making sense of, rather than evaluating, student thinking later in the course. These findings show that it is possible to design an asynchronous online course to productively engage teachers in video discussions and inform theory development in online teacher education.

Online Engineering Pedagogy: A Proposal for Specialization of the Teacher Training in Engineering

The context of the COVID-19 pandemic produced new immediate needs in the field of university teaching related to distance learning and forces the universities to transform their “traditional” face-to-face teaching methods, particularly with the implementation of online education. This situation represented a challenge not only for the universities but also for the teachers because they need to transform their teaching work in the classroom to online strategies for online learning environments. To meet these needs for effective online education an online pilot training course in Engineering Education based on the IGIP Curriculum of the TU Dresden was designed and implemented. The course “Introduction to online teaching and learning in engineering” (in Spanish: “Introducción a la Enseñanza-Aprendizaje Online en Ingeniería”) consisted of 4 modules implemented on a mix of online communication strategy of synchronous activities carried out on the Zoom platform, together with asynchronous work on a Moodle-based LMS platform. The course was offered between May and June 2020 for a group of academics of the Faculty of Engineering of a public Chilean University. This paper describes the designed online pilot training course in Engineering Pedagogy and presents the results of the evaluation of its implementation. For this a survey was applied and filled by the participants to evaluate the course and to know their per-ceptions about their competencies development to improve online learning in engineering.

Exclusion from constructive alignment unmasked by emergency teaching

CONTEXT The research study was conducted at a contact-based, research-intensive university in South Africa, where the faculty of engineering has adopted a feedback-feedforward approach to improving engineering pedagogy through theoretically-supported, interdisciplinary and community-of-practice approaches. The outcomes-based curricula are designed to explicitly align teaching/learning activities, the intended learning outcomes and assessment tasks. The Covid-19 emergency remote teaching (ERT) phase has raised the question of the disjuncture between student perceptions and assessment performance during independent, remote learning.PURPOSE OR GOALA faculty-wide research initiative to determine how undergraduate engineering students were experiencing ERT revealed significant systemic challenges and heightened academic stress. Of particular concern in 2021 is the 2nd year cohort, whose entire 1st year was under ERT conditions. Poor first term assessment performance suggested the need to investigate not only how students were studying, but their perceptions of their practices and efforts in relation to their perceptions of course requirements, and consequently their performance.APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS A mixed-method survey-based approach was used to assess second year students’ perceptions of a design-based module. The surveys were sent out when it became clear that performance was going to be substantially poorer than expected for their first in-person and closed-book assessment after ERT. The samples were taken after the assessment, after the model answers lecture, after the marks were published, and again after an intervention. The 2020 marks were compared with the last in-person assessments from 2019. Out of the 280 students, 142 responded to the survey.ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES Students overestimated their marks after writing, even after seeing the model answers. Two thirds reported the paper as difficult, which reduced to 58% after the model answers, and 74% after releasing the marks. Two thirds said online lectures prepared them sufficiently, but after the marks only 45% did. After a reflection-in-action intervention, 81% considered them sufficient and the error in estimated marks for the next assessment reduced by 41%. Despite 97% engagement with the lectures and 96% claiming to have done the tutorials and practicals on their own, only 38% used the Q&A forums, and not a single student made an appointment with the lecturer.CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY While constructive alignment is a common pedagogical approach, it does not explicitly include alignment to student abilities or perceptions. In contact-based, socio-culturally mediated contexts, educators may tacitly be responsive to (mis)conceptions to enhance alignment between student abilities, expectations and intended course outcomes. We suggest, in this paper, that a constructive alignment model needs to include methods to overcome self-efficacy gaps, given that we need to produce critically-thinking, confident, and capable graduates.

Evaluation of Teacher Training Needs in Engineering Pedagogy

In European countries, primarily in German-speaking countries, first of all, in Germany (Dresden), the concept of engineering pedagogy (EP) has existed for more than 70 years. In Eastern Europe, particularly in the Russian Federation, the tradition of EP has more than 20 years and shows an extensive network of universities actively participating in IGIP (International Society of Engineering Pedagogy). Several universities offer the IGIP curricula and work on various projects related to majoring in engineering education and pedagogy in Russian Higher Education Institutions. In Spanish-speaking countries the concept of EP is relatively recent. Particularly, since 2014, the Technical University of Dresden (TU Dresden) works in cooperation with Chilean universities to strengthen engineering pedagogy and education in the university context. This goal was concretized through two cooperation projects “Engineering Didactics at Chilean Universities” (PEDING-Project) and “Strengthening engineering training at Chilean universities through practice partner-ships” (STING-Project), both financially supported by DAAD. The main goal of this paper is to present the results of a survey about teaching needs in engineering pedagogy in a Chilean university. In general, the results showed the high level of interest and motivation that a training course on engineering pedagogy specifically oriented for the academic staff of engineering faculties may have. The project was led by the International Center of Engineering Education (CIEI) at the University of Talca (Chile) under the pedagogical support of the TU Dresden (Germany).

Formation Engineering and Pedagogy of E-Learning in Light of Corona Pandemic

As a result of the global epidemiological reality, E-learning has become a necessity for advanced educational systems because universities are the backbone of scientific, economic, political and social development for all nations alike because they are a major source of minds, it is based on two main pillars, namely the teacher who is the foundation building block and the basic structure of the other pillar, which is the student who relies on his teacher in terms of his cognitive and scientific development in addition to psychological, educational and social guidance. As for the basic role that every student relies on, it is qualifying him to obtain the certificate, all of which is in the end in the interest of society, so a relationship is formed between the student and the teacher and the focus of which is the pedagogical interaction based on respect, care and exhortation to convey knowledge and abilities, whether by the student or the teacher. The current paper aims to formulate a vision for E-learning according to the perspective of training engineering planning (components, programs, financial capacity, implementation, follow-up, results and questionnaire) with pedagogical support based on the consistency of roles between the student and the teacher from the scientific and psychological point of view, and the psychological component is a fundamental factor in the success of Educational process. Key words: E-learning, Corona pandemic, Formation engineering, Pedagogy.