Patrick Keleher

Successful Cross-Campus Management of First Year Engineering Courses

Central Queensland University (CQU) is a young multi-campus regional university based in Rockhampton, Central Queensland, Australia. The engineering undergraduate program consists of a combination of project-based learning, cooperative education and professional practice. The first year of the engineering undergraduate program at CQU can be studied at any one of three campuses; Rockhampton, Gladstone or Mackay. Gladstone and Mackay campuses are separated by one hour and three hours travel by road respectively from the Rockhampton campus. During their first year of study, students have the opportunity to reside in their home city or region enabling a smoother transition from secondary to tertiary education. A significant component of the first year program is delivered using the project based learning (PBL) paradigm, utilising a range of delivery modes including face-to-face workshops, synchronous video-conferencing of lectures, print-based materials, and Web-based learning management. In this paper, the authors examine the challenges associated with providing equitable learning opportunities for students studying first year PBL courses across the three campuses, and methods used to assess this. The advantages and disadvantages of modern electronic communication are considered, both from the point of view of staff and students. The additional complexity introduced when delivering a PBL course across remote campuses is also discussed

Towards an Assessment Tool for the Strategic Management of Asset Criticality

Many organisations in both the private and public sectors rely on engineering assets to provide products and services. The failure of these assets, or their components, can have undesirable consequences for the organization. Failure consequences can be measured in terms of their impact on the safety of personnel, the public and the environment, and on their impact on desired levels of service or output. Existing decision tools for determining the criticality of asset failure are typically rigorous and detailed. They are necessarily time consuming methodologies. A strategic management approach seeks to focus the effort and cost of such detailed analysis more appropriately. It recognises the value of the expert knowledge of those directly engaged in operations and maintenance functions in supporting a strategic approach to the assessment of asset criticality. The purpose of such a tool is to quickly and effectively identify critical assets within a facility to assist strategic decision making. The assessment tool being trialled is to support the Maintenance function of organisations and therefore it is focussed on the Operations and Maintenance phase of the asset life cycle. This paper presents an overview of the alternative methodology being trialled and some examples of its practical application.

Work-Integrated Learning in Engineering, Built Environment and Technology: Diversity of Practice in Practice

The Chemical Engineering Practice School (ChEPS) at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) in Bangkok is a two-year international curriculum modeled after Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Chemical Engineering Practice. The aim of this Master’s program is to produce professional chemical engineers with strong fundamentals, practical experience, and a good command of English. The program’s uniqueness lies in its strong linkage with the industrial sector. This chapter contains a history of ChEPS and details how KMUTT operates the program. The key factors contributing to the success of the program are identified. Moreover, critical analyses gleaned from the faculty, the alumni, and the industrial sponsors are carried out to examine the current strengths of ChEPS and to identify areas for improvement. Key challenges still facing the program are also outlined. Finally, potential solutions to these challenges are recommended.

Educators + tech-heads = Ed-techs, ‘the symphony’

When academics and computer technicians do not work in unison a dissonance can occur in the learning provided to students as the best software application or technical solution and the most appropriate or engaging learning experience may not be harmoniously orchestrated. At CQUniversity, Australia, out of the cacophony of experiences, frustration and limitations approaches have been developed and implemented to enable successful and innovative learning and teaching approaches. For the last ten years academics and computer technicians have collaborated to instigate Ed-Tech solutions, including interactive technologies into the classroom and for academics on the move, needing to access resources or communicate with students and colleagues in delivering its undergraduate Engineering programs. These innovations extend to web based communications (web conference between students through ‘ScopiaTM’), application sharing (CitrixTM Main Frames Application Delivery via http for applications such as MatlabTM, Microsoft OfficeTM, AutoCADTM and other CAD applications, Strand 7TM and Visual StudioTM — on both Apple and Microsoft platforms for students and academics) and secure access outside of university networks. The collaborative relationship, the ‘symphony’, between technical staff and academics, has ensured ‘outside the box’ thinking and far more realistic Information Technology outcomes have been implemented to improve lecturer delivery and student learning.

The challenge of embedding Information Literacy as a graduate attribute into engineering and technology courses

Universities and professional bodies require graduates to be skilled practitioners educated to a high standard of competency with proficiency in a diversity of graduate attributes. Some attributes are discipline based while others are of a more generic nature. Proficiency in the generic attribute of Information Literacy can provide the necessary scaffolding to enable practitioners to engage in the digital landscape to identify, locate, evaluate, manage and apply information and acknowledge information sources in their chosen field or profession. Non-technical courses have always been considered better suited to addressing Information Literacy skills. Commonly, assessment in these types of programs consists of written essays, analysing case studies, and report writing; assessment which is generally more applicable to the implicit embedding of Information Literacy skills. Technical courses, generally, rely more heavily on mathematical computations and technical descriptions and drawings to demonstrate knowledge and information and are proving to be more challenging to effectively embed Information Literacy as a learning outcome. The Information Literacy framework consists of six competency levels; essentially identify, find, evaluate, manage, apply, and acknowledge. This paper explores the preliminary process of including Information Literacy implicitly, into assessment items in an undergraduate engineering technical course; Control Systems Analysis and Design.

Conducting successful studies in Materials Science and Engineering with consideration to a multiplicity of student cohorts and delivery modes

Second year students undertaking their studies in Materials Science and Engineering within the Bachelor of Engineering at CQUniversity, Australia, are a diverse group requiring a variety of approaches to enable them to undertake their studies. The university, whilst having a strong regional focussed approach, conducts its Engineering degree offerings over three campuses, at Mackay, Rockhampton and Gladstone, in Queensland, Australia and by flexible mode throughout Australia and internationally. Lecturers are located on each of the campuses and it is their role to oversee the cohort of on-campus students on that particular campus. On-campus, full-time students are traditionally secondary students who have continued with their studies into tertiary education or mature learners who have been in the workforce for some time and return to study to re-skill, up-skill or update their knowledge and skill base. While students who study by a part-time, external (ie. flexible or distance) study mode are practitioners who have a trade qualification or are university graduates wishing to re-skill, up-skill or update their knowledge and skill base and continue working throughout their study. All students have access to course materials, video-streams of lectures, student-student and student-lecturer communication channels via a dedicated course MoodleTM website.

Sliding mode control of a PR manipulator at physical constraint boundaries

In this paper we investigate the control of a PR manipulator to targets that lie on the boundary of its workspace within finite time. This is achieved by introducing a boundary avoidance parameter, /spl epsi/, into potential functions defined by constraint boundaries that are incorporated into a Liapunov function. We report and compare on the speed of convergence in two simulations that utilise the unique nature of the sliding mode surfaces in both Cartesian and polar formulations.