Survey on Digitalisation of the Engineering Curriculum

The increasingly digital world is being reflected in the way in which we practice and teach engineering.  Emergency remote instruction during the COVID pandemic has shown that indeed most of an engineering degree can be taught online; however, the majority of efforts in this space were digital versions of face-to-face teaching.  As we emerge from the pandemic it is timely to consider which parts of the curriculum matter most for student learning, and whether they should return to face to face delivery, or move towards digital native forms of learning.

The UNESCO Centre for PBL at Aalborg University is running a survey to evaluate faculty perceptions of how important a range of activities are for student learning, as well as how suitable those experiences are for digitalization.  The items on this survey are not structured by the traditional timetabled experiences for student engineers (eg lectures / tutorials / laboratories); instead these experiences have been unpacked into the affordances that they provide.

Our goal is to focus future digitalization efforts on the parts of the curriculum that matter for student learning, and in the areas where the learning can best be achieved through digital approaches.  We also seek to understand how these perceptions vary across the global engineering education community, and so it is important that we have responses from academics worldwide.

The survey is available online at tiny.cc/digitalsurvey

Any questions regarding the survey can be directed to Euan Lindsay, Professor of PBL and Digitalisation in Engineering Education: edl@plan.aau.dk