Keith Willey

University of Technology Sydney | UTS · Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology

Authentic assessment is often positioned as an educational panacea, invoked in response to a broad range of complex problems. This paper considers authentic assessment in relation to three key challenges: preparing graduates for the future, cheating, and inclusion. Despite literature supporting its potential benefits, there is limited evidence on t...

CONTEXT The success of Engineering graduates transition to professional practice depends on the achievement and application of both their technical and professional competencies (Scott and Yates 2002). To ensure the integration and the development of these skills, there has been a move to incorporating more practice based and authentic contexts in...

CONTEXT

The professional formation of new graduates and their ability to perform well at the start of their career depends on the development of both technical skills and professional competencies. Whilst the latter aspects have become increasingly considered within engineering programs, they are often learnt within an academic context rather than a practi...

Throughout history, the nature of professional engineering practice has constantly evolved, driven not only by evolution in technology and scientific knowledge but also by changes in the way in which our engineered solutions interact with society. As a consequence, there is a strong need for engineers to not only understand the changing nature of t...

Many engineering academics interested in quality teaching and learning dabble with educational research. Some go further leaving their technical research field behind to embark head-long into what for many is an initially bewildering and conceptually challenging domain. Often peers perceive this transition as a crime (giving up on real engineering)...

STRUCTURED ABSTRACT CONTEXT: The Faculty of Engineering and IT at the University of Sydney recently introduced an Integrated Engineering program consisting of four core units of study across all engineering majors. The program was created to provide a cross-disciplinary integrating focus throughout the degree programs, linking the development of br...

Engineering practice requires engineers who have strong spoken and written communication skills, but the development of these skills, notably writing practices, is often invisible in the engineering curriculum, and rarely embedded. Decades of reviews of engineering education have identified the gap between the engineering curriculum and engineering...

Peer review has been the focus of an ongoing study at a series of recent annual conferences of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE). A further development of this study has been to explore the perspective/s of the authors of these conference papers and the impact that peer review can have on their development as researchers...

Engineering practice requires engineers who have strong spoken and written communication skills, but the development of these skills, notably writing practices, is often invisible in the engineering curriculum, and rarely embedded. Decades of reviews of engineering education have identified the gap between the engineering curriculum and engineering...

Engineering students are expected to graduate with high level written and oral communication, yet these expectations continue to fall short despite re-peated calls by industry and by accrediting bodies such as Engineers Aus-tralia for engineering faculties to address this issue. One explanation for this ongoing challenge is that the prevailing prac...

The increased adoption of blended learning designs such as flipped instruction by STEM academics has brought learning benefits for many students; however, it relies heavily on students being able to take much more responsibility for their own learning than in traditional lecture-based subjects (Reidsema et al 2017). Previous studies (Willey & Gard...

Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with written communication, despite years of interventions to improve student writing. Much has been written about the importance of getting engineering students to write, but there has been a little investigation of engineeri...

Written communication is neither systematically developed nor practised in the engineering curriculum, despite expectations by universities and employers that engineering graduates will be proficient communicators, and despite interventions to develop students' writing. The gap in the development of students' written communication calls for an inve...

CONTEXT Competence in written communication is regarded as a critical requirement for engineering graduates and engineering educators alike, but the development of writing within the engineering curriculum is frequently invisible, and occasionally non-existent. This is despite repeated calls from EA and employer groups for Australian engineering fa...

This demonstration reports applying research in learning dispositions, orientations, agency, identity and collaborative learning to develop a suite of online software tools and resources. These tools have been specifically designed to assist educators to help students take advantage of the affordances of blended learning environments as well recogn...

Flipped instruction is a form of blended learning that moves significant instruction and preparation outside the classroom to facilitate ‘in class’ time to be used for more participative learning activities. These activities should provide opportunities for students to interact and collaborate to improve their learning, their learning experience an...

The ability to communicate - orally and in writing - is a graduate attribute that employers in many countries rank as number one in importance, aside from relevant qualifications. This paper reports the implementation and evaluation of a collaborative peer assessment and self-assessment learning and teaching (L&T) initiative, which was designed to...

The field of research (FoR) that an academic participates in is both a manifestation of, and a contributor to the development of their identity. When an academic changes that FoR the question then arises as to how they reconcile this change with their identity. This paper uses the identity-trajectory framework to analyse the discourse of 19 enginee...

Although writing is still the main form of assessment at university, the practice of writing continues to be marginalised, particularly in technical disciplines such as engineering, notwithstanding decades of reports identifying gaps in graduate communication abilities in these fields, and diverse interventions to address these gaps. The assumption...

Writing practices are seen to be essential for professional engineers, yet many engineering students and academics struggle with communicating in writing. This is despite the best efforts over many years of engineering educators and writing experts to develop writing strategies within or adjunct to the engineering curriculum. Much has been written...

Becoming a particular type of scholar or researcher and developing a higher level of expertise in a field of academic activity involves a transformation of identity. The purpose of this research is to help members of the engineering education community better understand the transition to becoming an engineering education researcher, and through dis...

Although discussion boards have been available in the Learning Management System (LMS) for several years, they have not served well as a means of extending student engagement outside class time. The social media site Facebook was incorporated into an Engineering Mechanics class with the aim of increasing subject specific student engagement. This pa...

While previous research has shown that assessments impact how students view the curriculum and influences what they learn and how they learn, the way that students approach their learning is also affected by aspects of the teaching and learning environment. Two different approaches adopted by students are mastery and performance goal orientation. S...

This paper presents the preliminary results of a multi-phased qualitative investigation of continuing professional learning. The study focused on the identifi cation of common engineering practices that contribute to learning. This paper examines a particular practice, that of the site-walk. It draws on practice theory, an emerging set of conceptua...

With the increasing challenges facing professional engineers working in more complex, global and interdisciplinary contexts, different approaches to understanding how engineers practice and learn are necessary. This paper draws on recent research in the social sciences from the field of workplace learning, to suggest that a practice-theory perspect...

This masterclass is based on findings from a study of the gender inclusivity of engineering students’ experiences of workplace learning. To Australian society’s detriment, women are under-represented among professional engineers and leave the engineering workforce at a higher rate than men. Although students at all Australian universities that offe...

CONTEXT It has become almost a cliché that engineers, (and by association engineering students) don't, won't, can't write. In order to redress this gap, there have been many excellent (and some successful) attempts in recent decades to develop the writing of engineering students, both in Australian universities and elsewhere. Yet the problem remain...

This paper examines the individual's experience of the peer review process to explore implications for the wider engineering education research community. A thematic analysis of interview transcripts showed that providing feedback to authors in reviews was mentioned equally as frequently as the role of quality assurance of the conference papers. We...

While flipped instruction may be the standard practice in many social science programs it is often promoted as a recent innovation in learning design within science and technology classrooms. Flipped instruction is a form of blended learning that replaces transmission-based lectures with more participative, interactive and collaborative learning op...

The landscape model presented in this paper stimulated dialogue around the nature of topics and research in our community and allowed participants to find a place to belong. We argue that such a dialogue will help us identify, develop and grow our research domain and support those seeking to participate in or move within it. We propose a developmen...

The ability to communicate – orally and in writing – is a graduate attribute that employers in many countries rank as number one in importance, aside from relevant qualifications. This paper reports the implementation and evaluation of a collaborative peer assessment and self-assessment learning and teaching (L&T) initiative, which was designed to...

Conference Key Areas: curriculum development, new learning concepts for engineering education, engineering education research.

This paper describes the benefits of co-constructed understandings of academic standards using a framework that includes collaborative conversations about assessment artefacts supported by online self and peer assessment technology. In particular in this paper we describe this process in the context of addressing the variations in understanding, gr...

Our research, an element which is reported in this paper, investigates the effectiveness of peer review of conference papers in enabling peer learning within the Australasian Association for Engineering Education (AAEE) community. This paper reports the responses of six 'new/emerging' authors from three types of Australian universities to the peer...

The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion, reflection, and learning about peer review in engineering education. As engineering education aspires to become a profession or discipline in its own right, it is important to examine the roles and effects of peer review in that process. Peer review and editorial decision-making pla...

This paper reports on the first phase of an Australian inter-disciplinary partnership study concerned with professional learning of experienced engineers. It is a theoretically motivated, qualitative paper that aims to produce detailed descriptions of professional learning that arise within professional engineering work. The paper uses practice the...

For many scholars conference papers are a stepping stone to submitting a journal article. However with increasing time pressures for presentation at conferences, peer review may in practice be the only developmental opportunity from conference attendance. Hence it could be argued that the most important opportunity to acquire the standards and norm...

In 2010 the Australian government commissioned the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) to undertake a national project to facilitate disciplinary development of threshold learning standards. The aim was to lay the foundation for all higher education providers to demonstrate to the new national higher education regulator, the Tertiary Ed...

Engineers are often required to make critical judgments involving decisions that extend beyond traditional discipline boundaries. This requires professional engineers to undertake ongoing learning. Much of this learning is informal, learnt on the job from peers. Hence, to prepare students for professional practice they require opportunities to expe...

Skills and knowledge that can be gained by groups of individuals will be affected by the characteristics of those groups. Systematic formation of the groups could therefore potentially lead to significantly improved learning outcomes. This research explores a framework for group formation that continuously adapts rules used for the grouping process...

For many years the authors have coordinated a large engineering design subject, having a cohort of approximately 300+ students. Lectures are supported by tutorials of approximately 32 students which incorporate collaborative team learning activities and project-based learning. Each tutor is responsible for grading the assessment tasks for students...

The authors have previously reported the effectiveness of using self and peer assessment to improve learning outcomes by providing opportunities to practise, assess and provide feedback on students’ attribute development. Despite this work and the research of others, a significant number of students and, indeed, many academics focus on the free-rid...

Research in identifying the relative importance of criteria used to select a preferred supplier has, for the most part, relied on subjective lists of criteria being presented to respondents. The research reported here uses an experimental design approach to quantify the importance of nine common criteria used in an actual evaluation and selection o...

Purpose Self‐ and peer assessment has proved effective in promoting the development of teamwork and other professional skills in undergraduate students. However, in previous research approximately 30 percent of students reported that its use produced no perceived improvement in their teamwork experience. It was hypothesised that a significant numbe...

Purpose As a way of focusing curriculum development and learning outcomes universities have introduced graduate attributes, which their students should develop during their degree course. Some of these attributes are discipline‐specific, others are generic to all professions. The development of these attributes can be promoted by the careful use of...

In this paper we present an adaptive shared control method for an intelligent wheelchair based on the Bayesian recursive technique to assist a disable user in performing obstacle avoidance tasks. Three autonomous tasks have been developed for different types of environments to improve the performance of the overall system. The system combines local...

Clients select contractors on the basis of the relative importance of tender evaluation criteria, such as, experience, expertise, past performance, and cost. This paper presents the results of a recent study that sought to identify a suite of representative (principal) tender evaluation and contractor selection criteria for use in future research....

The authors have previously reported the effectiveness of using self and peer assessment to improve learning outcomes by providing opportunities to practise, assess and provide feedback on students' attribute development. Despite this work and the research of others, we have found a significant number of students perceive self and peer assessment t...

The authors have previously reported the effectiveness of using self and peer assessment to improve learning outcomes in groupwork by providing opportunities to practise, assess and provide feedback on students' attribute development. Combining this research and that reported in the literature on learning-oriented assessment we theorised that self...

Self and peer assessment has proved effective in promoting the development of teamwork and other professional skills in undergraduate students. However, in previous research approximately 30% of students reported its use produced no perceived improvement in their teamwork experience. It was hypothesised that a significant number of these students w...

In this paper we present an advanced method of obstacle avoidance for a laser based intelligent wheelchair using optimized Bayesian neural networks. Three neural networks are designed for three separate sub-tasks: passing through a door way, corridor and wall following and general obstacle avoidance. The accurate usable accessible space is determin...

In this paper we present a method of shared control strategy for an intelligent wheelchair to assist a disable user in performing obstacle avoidance tasks. The system detects obstacles in front of the wheelchair using a laser range finder sensor. As the wheelchair moves the information from the laser range finder is combined with data from the enco...

UTS Engineering Capstone Projects provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate a capacity to perform at the level expected of a graduate engineer. The existing subject requirements had remained relatively unchanged for over 10 years and some project supervisors had expressed concern regarding a perceived drop in quality of project work – and...

Professionals, in addition to being technically competent, require skills of collaboration, communication and the ability to work in teams [1,2]. There is a reported competency gap between these skills required by employers and those developed by students during their undergraduate courses [3,4]. In response to this gap Universities have introduced...

Summary Professionals, in addition to being technically competent, need a range of generic skills including, teamwork, communication, being able to think both critically and independently, being able to critically appraise one's work and the work of others and an appreciation of the need and value of reflection in both their personal and profession...

The authors have previously reported the effectiveness of using self and peer assessment to improve learning outcomes. Its thoughtful use provides opportunities to practise, assess and provide feedback on students' graduate attribute development. Our previous research has shown that it is beneficial for teams to use self and peer assessment multipl...

In this paper we present a real-time obstacle avoidance algorithm using a Bayesian neural network for a laser based wheelchair system. The raw laser data is modified to accommodate the wheelchair dimensions, allowing the free-space to be determined accurately in real-time. Data acquisition is performed to collect the patterns required for training...

There is a reported competency gap between the teamwork skills required by employers and those developed by engineering students during their undergraduate courses. The University of Technology, Sydney is addressing this issue by combining project-based learning with self and peer assessment to determine an individual's team performance. A confiden...

Professional skills including self reflection, critical evaluation and an ability to work in teams are important for all practising engineers. While most undergraduate engineering programs contain some instruction to help students develop professional skills, the ongoing development of these skills is often treated on an ad hoc basis. This paper re...

'Common Electrode' microneurography (i.e. stimulating a nerve and recording return afferent neural activity through the same microelectrode facilitates investigation of linkages between sensory and motor nervous systems in humans. Currently there is no commercial product designed specifically to conduct common electrode microneurography experiments...

Teaching larger, more diverse 'classes is an increasing challenge as globalisation iricreases and public funding of higher education contracts. Feedback and reflection are important components in improving the learning process yet are relatively under researched. When teaching such classes there are often insufficient resources to firstly diagnose...

There is a reported competency gap between the teamwork skills required by employers and those developed by engineering students during their undergraduate courses. It is important for university courses to develop learning-oriented assessments that will encourage development of teamwork skills and a commitment to ongoing development after graduati...

There is a reported competency gap between the teamwork skills required by employers and those developed by engineering students during their undergraduate courses. While project-based learning increases the opportunities for team interaction, it does not necessarily produce the skills required to function effectively in a team. Students also repor...

The systems perspective has been established as a means to structure and understand complex phenomenon. Current approaches are premised on defining and establishing a hierarchical (reductionist) structure that, in effect represents a complex system as a system of systems. The underlying assumption of reductionism is that the resultant component beh...

Large scale complex engineering systems (LSCES), or complex systems, and their development comprise many factors of influence, of which some are currently known, others not yet known, and some may never be fully understood. Given the very nature of, and operating difficulties in developing complex systems, often there are inconsistencies associated...

Considerable attention has been drawn by many researchers toward the System Development Life Cycle and how best to manage the development of a Large Scale Systems within a competitive environment. The success in developing these systems is dependent upon many factors of influence both within the organisation delivering the system, and the market se...

Traditionally, when designing a satellite communications system, an allowance is made in the link budget for pointing loss. The earth station's antenna size is then selected to achieve the desired gain margin. In this article, a different approach called antenna optimization (AO) is proposed, where the objective is to ensure that the antenna pointi...

The issues involved in selecting a pedestal for tracking low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are discussed. An X-Y pedestal allows zenith pass tracking even with relatively low speed motors. Additional advantages of an X-Y design include identical X and Y axes, which keep spare part requirements to a minimum, and the ability to use high quality, off-t...

Junior structural engineers rarely work alone. Their design calculations are usually peer reviewed, and they may be involved in reviewing other engineers' designs. They are also likely to have to articulate their design decisions to their supervisor or the project team, if not the client. At the University of Technology, Sydney the authors redesign...

Recently there has been a shift to focus on assessing students' learning outcomes in terms of graduate attributes which they should develop and demonstrate during the course of their degree. A number of universities have tried to address these issues for example by using software tools such as ReView to track attribute development or by producing b...

For several years the authors have coordinated a large engineering design subject, having a typical cohort of more than 300 students per semester. Lectures are supported by tutorials of approximately 32 students that incorporate a combination of collaborative team and project-based learning activities. Each tutor is responsible for grading the asse...

Arguably, the most important opportunity to acquire the standards and norms of the discipline and develop researchers" judgement is the peer review process – but this depends on the quality of the reviews. "Good" feedback has been identified as being timely, specific and relevant. Yet often reviews lack these basic qualities. In this paper we repor...

Arguably, the most important opportunity to acquire the standards and norms of the discipline and develop researchers' judgement is the peer review process – but this depends on the quality of the reviews. 'Good' feedback -which we take to mean feedback that has the capacity to improve subsequent practice -has been identified as being timely, speci...

In large engineering subjects, it is common to have multiple tutors where each tutor is responsible for grading the assessment tasks for students in their tutorial. An issue regularly faced by subject coordinators is how to achieve a consistent standard of marking and feedback quality amongst different tutors. To address this issue the authors init...

The authors have previously reported the effectiveness of using self and peer assessment to improve learning outcomes by providing opportunities to practise, assess and provide feedback on students' learning and development. Despite this work and the research of others, we found a significant number of students perceive self and peer assessment to...

Engineers today are often required to make critical judgements involving decisions that extend beyond traditional discipline boundaries requiring ongoing learning, much of which is informal, learnt on the job from peers who are often from different disciplines. To prepare students for professional practice, they need opportunities to experience, pr...

An important graduate attribute is the ability to work in teams, so many university courses incorporate this as part of the learning experience. However, it is inevitable that in some teams there will be members who do not contribute as much to the overall effort as others, leading to frustration in those members who carry the majority of the burde...

Engineers today are required to make critical judgements involving decisions that often extend beyond traditional discipline boundaries. This requires professional engineers to undertake ongoing learning. Much of this learning is informal, learnt on the job from peers from different disciplines. To enable students to develop the skills required for...