PBL for Doctoral Students in Collaboration with SMEs: “Thinking like a Professional Engineer”

Abstract

The recent global economic downturn brought sharply into focus the need for engineers that excel not only technically and academically but also having a multiplicity of transferable skills, flexibility of mind and resilience. Considerable effort has been focused in UK and internationally on the development of doctoral students with such mind-sets and skills. At the Universities of Sheffield & Manchester, the teaching of transferrable skills in the Doctoral Training Centre for Advanced Metallics is done in the form of a Diploma in Personal & Professional Skills and such skills are embedded in the students' consciousness by practice. The development of Problem Based Learning experience through a two week long exercise where groups of students tackle "real-life" problems at an SME has been organized and successfully taken place over the past two years and students, staff and industrial partners have all felt the benefits. This work shows the multiplying effect that the SME case studies have on student skill and attitude development and as a result their employability. Colleagues will see how the use of "real-life" problem solving can be used to focus and sharpen the students' use of transferrable skills that have been taught in other parts of a structured course. The reality of the situation faced, the tight time limits afforded, the responsibility to function and deliver as part of a group of "professional" consultants act as multipliers of the skills employed towards generating and proposing solutions. Students see in practice what transferrable skills mean to them and of course employers are suitably impressed when they see skills they seek from graduates being used to the full.

Learner Experiences During the Design-Based Research Process for a Problem-Based Instructional Design Course

“…The level of support from outside SMEs/clients had a serious impact on students’ motivation and the overall quality of the work in PBL (Kapranos, 2015). Provision of protocols and guidelines should help explicitly explain expectations and types of support to be given to students with whom SMEs work.…”

“…Timely scaffolding (e.g., helping to link content knowledge to their analysis, use mapping charts to depict the topic analysis, and create a visual representation) for task analysis ensured that the students identified the hidden tasks/topics from the initial analysis and determined the focused tasks/topics for their lesson to be developed. It was tremendously important to involve the SMEs in this process (Kapranos, 2015). The SMEs checked the accuracy of the content and helped determine the hours and resources they expected to be used for each project.…”