The lectures were general and wide-ranging, covering: philosophical and psychological issues; critical thinking; engineering disciplines; advice on teamwork and communications; and history of human development and engineering—one early lecture covered the history of engineering from human evolution through to modern science. Attendance rates, both in person and views of lecture recordings, were low and fell further after the first few weeks.
Pracs took place in two types of labs, electronic and computer. The Nuclear and Village groups’ pracs were held in electronics labs (see Figure 39 for an example), which have a high dividing island with electronic equipment between two sets of long desks; students cannot see the whole room, just students seated nearby. The Renewables group prac was in a computer lab (see Figure 28 for an example): each student had a lab computer and there were no barriers between desks, i.e. everyone in the class was visible to each other and the tutors. Computers had standard (e.g. Microsoft Office software, browsers) and specialty software (e.g. MATLAB, CAD drawing) and an ethernet internet connection. Outside pracs, students used a variety of locations on campus and online, outlined in each case description.
The first three-hour prac session, in week 3, started with discussion of scenarios asking groups to apply ethics as covered in that week’s lecture. The remainder of the weeks were mostly allocated to project work, however with a high proportion of several pracs dedicated to the individual MATLAB task. The pracs in the early part of the semester tended to have low attendance and those students who did come along generally left early. The tutors started taking more strict attendance after the mid-semester break (week 7) and were asked to monitor whether the students were applying themselves in the allocated prac time; attendance picked up after this measure.
All students at the university were provided with access to the Google suite of cloud-based tools. This included a university email account, cloud-based file storage and use of tools such as a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation composer, all of which afforded collaborative composition, editing and commenting. The tools were not explicitly promoted to students for use in their projects. The course, in line with others at the university, had an online presence hosted in the University’s Moodle-based learning management system. The course home page provided access to recordings of lectures, files, including lecture notes and task instructions, group registration, online forums and assignment submission.
5.1 Renewables group
(KC1 - Divided knowledge work)
This group tackled the problem of renewable energy:
“Renewable energy solutions for Australia”:- What does it take to be completely carbon neutral and still serve our current energy needs. Investigate the viability and efficiency of alternative green power in Australia. What is needed to provide the entire society with renewable energy supply? How should the power grid / distribution be organized to make most efficient use of the renewable energy sources?
Consider the efficiency and life expectancy of the renewable energy sources. Consider all possible sources of renewable energy such as solar power, wind energy, biogas, geothermal, water waves, etc. Conclude with a projection to other parts of the world.
(Renewable energy task description)
The interdependence of this group of initially five students, and hence a reason to productively work together, was lessened by the division of topics between members and scarce secondary
infrastructure. The group met only in prac sessions and, while starting relatively early and discussing means of online communication, limited digital communications to a few emails. A Google Doc was irregularly used by a couple of students until the final week, when it was used to assemble the elements of the report. The group divided the project into discrete topics of one energy source each and did not generally plan for and collaborate on the project’s core posed problems. There was some lack of time in pracs, due to students being directed to work on technical exercises. Students also used the pracs to work on other courses’ assessment, and talked about the general area of renewable energy, but not always in a way that directly contributed to the progress of their project. The absence in the second half of the project of a group member, who took on an early leadership role, contributed to uncertainty around the task. This group showed elements of academic
procrastination (Steel & Klingsieck, 2016) until the final week, which seemed to be linked to lack of a clear plan and easy, common communications, visibility of (lack of) progress, and reticence in
leading or directing each other. In the final week of the project, students shared information on their researched energy sources and discussed their viability in providing renewable energy.
5.1.1 Object diagram
The diagram of objects (Figure 26) for the Renewables group is relatively low in density of objects and connections between concepts over the weeks, showing a long period in the middle of the project that was under-used for conceptual development. The group spent a short time discussing related topics in earlier weeks, but the majority of discussion and coordination of the report took place in week 10. The discussion in the week 8 prac between Kevin and Michael on batteries and energy conversion, (a) in the diagram, was not connected by students to the wider project. This diagram indicates periods of individual work on technical skills in LaTeX and MATLAB, (b) and (c) in the diagram, which were not direct project work. This was also a feature of the other groups’ prac work, although not represented in those diagrams. The shared Google Doc, proposed in week 4 was little used before Week 10, effectively keeping individual research siloed until then.