Partnerships required for teaching in a collaborative space

The procurement and development of new technologies to improve student-learning experiences in an engineering program at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) brought much excitement and increasing expectations from both staff and students. The purpose-built tech-rich learning environments were completed for use in Semester 2, 2015. The infrastructure included two Immersive Visualisation environments; a 3D Immersive Visualisation Environment (IVE) and a 3D enabled Engineering Collaboration Studio (ECS). The development of the curriculum and content for delivery in this new infrastructure was managed by a dedicated content delivery team, using a partnership approach across engineering educators, curriculum design specialists and technical experts. The CAVE consists of a 320-degree immersive array of 80 screens with advanced technology, high resolution surround sound system. A tracking system enables users to move around 3D images and interact with them. The design of the Engineering Collaboration Studio (ECS) with 11 large tables each with networked computers that can share screens, facilitates the development of teamwork and supports inquiry/problem based learning approaches. The partnerships required between students and lecturers using this space to facilitate successful learning outcomes from these state-of-the-art spaces were evident early on. This investment in visualisation technologies was driven by the desire to push our learning and teaching partnerships with tech based innovations, to enhance our science-technology-engineering-math (STEM) curriculum and to create a platform that facilitates USCs engagement with the wider community. To equip students generally, and engineering students in particular, with the skills required by the 21st Century workforce, curriculum needs to integrate the development of both transferable skills (USC Graduate Attributes in this case) and specific discipline content knowledge in an integrated way (Brestow, 2015). To achieve this in the development of the courses that were to be taught in the new visualisation facilities, a discipline specific quality assurance framework was developed through the constructive alignment (Biggs and Tang, 2012) of the institutional level graduate attributes, industry EA competencies, and the subsequent pedagogical and assessment design. Program-learning outcomes were then mapped to individual courses and aligned to course learning outcomes. The course learning outcomes informed the course content, learning experiences and assessment (USC Quality assurance framework) for these courses. Clear messages from the study of engineering students and lecturers at three Australian universities are “students need to see theory in the context of applications” and students overwhelmingly favour the visual learning over the verbal learning (Boles et al., 2010). These findings highlight the mismatch between the traditional lecturing style of engineering education and the preferred learning styles of the student cohort (Felder and Brent, 2005). The new visualisation technologies positioned USC to use these ‘classroom laboratories’ (Christensen 1991, cited in Brestow, 2015) to explore visualisation enhanced learning in engineering education. These concepts were explored in surveys of students undertaking courses using these facilities over the last two years. This presentation will also document the experience of the lecturers who used these cutting-edge immersion facilities in the first semesters they were available.;