Robert McLaughlan, Faculty of Engineering
Technology Assessment is the final compulsory subject within the BE Dip Eng. Prac Degree. Students come from all fields of engineering practice where most of their learning has had a focus on developing technical skills. Once the students graduate as engineers they will need to be able incorporate multiple perspectives, whether political, social or economic, into their work. One of the main outcomes of the subject is the ability for students to adopt multiple stakeholders' perspectives and to integrate these perspectives into the final decision-making.
Technology Assessment aims to reflect on the interdisciplinary nature of engineering activity by having inter-disciplinary class teams like those generally used in practice to tackle technology assessments. The subject adopts a role-based learning structure where students develop the skills for involving the community to determine the impact of engineering activity.
The role-play activity starts in week 5 of the semester following a process of reading and online quizzes to test their comprehension of key readings on Technology Assessment. The online controversy takes a week to complete, which is considered enough time to flush out all the issues focused around a multidimensional engineering problem. A scenario is chosen for it's cross disciplinary nature so that the issues explored are relevant to all forms of engineering.
To complete the online debate the students self-select into groups of four who choose one scenario from among a few different topics. Having between 200 and 300 students in final year engineering required three debates to be running at one time, with two topics running at the same and one totally separate topic. Students can only see their own forum and the responses of the other stakeholders in that forum.
The range of stakeholder groups is organised ahead of time once the topic of the debate has been determined. Each stakeholder group receives a short biography that outlines their role and it is then up to each group to research the stakeholder's perspective further.
For any debate there might be as many as 25 stakeholders coming into a forum. Students choose their stakeholder group and need to advocate on behalf of their stakeholder, researching the issues from their point of view and challenging alternative views. In assessing the online controversy the reflection on the task is separated out from the performance in the debate.
Three sets of data are collected to evaluate the quality of participation in the group. The first is called the "People's Choice Awards" where the students assess themselves using the quiz function on Canvas. After analysing their contributions to the forum students will rank which stakeholder group provided the most convincing discussion of the issues. Students complete the quiz by answering questions on each of the contributors to the forum with the results used to distribute the final student marks.
The student's choice is compared with the marks allocated by the tutor and lecturer. The tutors go through the postings using the same criteria as the student to give a mark and written feedback on where contributions were consistent with research and showed an appreciation of participatory design. This is repeated by the lecturer who likewise goes through all the postings follow the same criteria as the students. It is the combination of the students, tutors and lecturers mark that make up the final assessment.
In addition to judging their collaborative performance students are asked to individually reflect on the process. To assess their participation in the activity students have to step back and act like a policy analyst, reviewing their online postings to write a reflective statement incorporating the major issues that arose out of that forum.
