The use of industrial visits to enhance learning at engineering courses

Industrial visits represent an important activity in any engineering undergraduate programme that contributes to the achievement of various essential learning outcomes and programme objectives. This paper reports on an attempt to make the industrial visit an integral part of the Engineering Design and Communication course. This is achieved through identifying learning outcomes and a suitable industrial site to achieve them. For this purpose a thermal power plant was indentified as a site to be visited by students. The visit was planned to help students to achieve the learning outcomes. A number of questions in form of surveys, related to the learning outcomes, were prepared and given to the students to answer. The pre-visit, after-visit, and post-visit surveys were aimed at priming the minds of the students, gauging the level of satisfaction, and assessing the level of retention of knowledge, respectively. Students found this method very useful and they were able to remember a fair bit of information after about semester from the trip date. Our assessment of this exercise is the objectives have been achieved