UK-SpecIAL

Incorporating UK-SPEC Learning Outcomes into an Open Learner Model to Promote Learner Independence
Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre Mini Project (MPF0806)

Susan Bull and Peter Gardner

Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Birmingham
s.bull@bham.ac.uk, p.gardner@bham.ac.uk

Background

The UK-SPEC Standards for Professional Engineering Competence (Engineering Council, 2004) must be met in order for degrees to be accredited. UK-SPEC identifies five areas: underpinning science and mathematics; engineering analysis; design; economic, social and environmental context; engineering practice. Each of the above areas is divided into specific learning outcomes, for example,

engineering analysis includes:

  • "ability to apply and integrate knowledge and understanding of other engineering disciplines to support study of their own engineering discipline";
  • "understanding of engineering principles and the ability to apply them to analyse key engineering processes".

engineering practice includes:

  • "awareness of nature of intellectual property and contractual issues";
  • "ability to work with technical uncertainty".

Each UK-SPEC learning outcome is relevant to several modules, and each module contributes to several learning outcomes. The following images illustrate this, showing (i) the contribution of a range of first year modules to a single UK-SPEC learning outcome, and (ii) the contribution of a single module to several UK-SPEC learning outcomes.





It is widely accepted that students do not always understand how the various components of their modules are related at the point they are studying them; a situation that also applies in engineering education (Avitabile et al., 2005). UK-SPEC, although designed for educators with reference to the accreditation of engineering degrees, also provides a framework within which to consider highlighting the relevance of aspects of their degree with reference to the engineering professions, to the students themselves. The UK-SpecIAL environment was designed to address the issue of students not having full awareness of the purpose of their modules, and to raise learner awareness of how their learning relates to professional engineering. To this end, UK-SPEC (Engineering Council, 2004) and the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET 2006) interpretation of UK-SPEC were used as the basis for the design of UK-SpecIAL.

UK-SpecIAL

The following image shows the UK-SpecIAL interface. In this example, a box is shown for each module that contributes to learning outcomes B20 and B21: "workshop and laboratory skills", and "understanding of contexts in which engineering knowledge can be applied (e.g. operations and management, technology development, etc.)", respectively; and indicates the overall level of an individual's understanding, calculated as an average of their knowledge level of the various topics comprising a module (see Bull et al. (2009) for details of the learner modelling system used). Each module appears under each of the learning outcomes to which it contributes. Clicking on a module title shows the details contributing to that learning outcome for that specific module (each module may contribute to a learning outcome in a different way). Our example shows "work safely in a workshop or lab, using a range of tools related to the assembly of electronic circuits and systems". This text is taken from the IET interpretation of UK-SPEC (IET, 2006).

Full details and results of the project can be found in the project publications listed below.

References

Avitabile, P., McKelliget, J. & Van Zandt, T. (2005). Interweaving Numerical Processing Techniques in Multisemester Projects, Proceedings of American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, American Society for Engineering.

Bull, S., Gardner, P., Ahmad, N., Ting, J. & Clarke, B. (2009). Use and Trust of Simple Independent Open Learner Models to Support Learning Within and Across Courses, in G-J. Houben, G, McCalla, F. Pianesi & M. Zancanari (eds), User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 42-53.

Engineering Council. (2004). UK Standard for Professional Engineering Competence, Accreditation of Higher Education Programmes, http://www.engc.org.uk/documents/Accreditation_HE_Progs.pdf.

IET (Institution of Engineering and Technology). (2006). Handbook of Learning Outcomes for BEng and MEng Degree Programmes, http://www2.theiet.org.

Project Publications