A Comparative Study of Staff Perspectives on Design Based Learning in Engineering Education

Sivachandran Chandrasekaran, Guy Littlefair, Matthew Joordens, Alex Stojcevski 
(School of Engineering, Deakin University, Geelong, Australia)

Abstract: The responsibility of staff is to review student learning and teaching practice, formulate goals to strengthen teaching practice, establish personal development, peer to peer learning and promote their work integrity. Industry expects graduate engineers to articulate engineering design problems with career-equipped skills such as problem solving, creativity, innovation, communication and project management. The question is, whether current curriculum practice does help graduate students to achieve and practice engineering skills expected by employers? For many decades, engineering educators have implemented many learning and teaching approaches such as project-based learning, problem based learning, design based learning in order to train students as professional engineers. Nonetheless, there is still a gap exits between students learning outcomes and the teaching practice. It is a vital task for pedagogy to compete and fulfil current design expectations in engineering.

This paper is part of a research study which aims to develop a framework for a newly proposed learning and teaching approach, project oriented design based learning (PODBL). Many universities in the Asia pacific region have used various learning and teaching approaches to enhance student learning outcomes. This research paper seeks staff members’ perspectives on design based learning approach from selected universities practicing design education in different ways. It looks into staff perspectives from Deakin University, Australasian University A, Australasian University B, Asian University A and Asian University B.

Key words: design based learning, staff perspectives, project oriented design-based learning, curriculum development