Quality outcomes of learning and teaching in final year engineering projects

Context: The final year engineering project (FYEP) is the culminating learning and teaching experience of engineering programs to demonstrate that students are capable of personally conducting and managing an engineering project at a standard expected of graduates. The introduction of the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) required new thinking about the ways in which FYEPs enable students to develop and demonstrate level 8 outcomes (AQF8), including those related to autonomous learning and research. These requirements are also required from international Engineering accreditation agreements such as the Washington Accord from the International Engineering Alliance. An Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) project on FYEP brought together a team of academics from seven universities across Australia, successfully producing real outcomes for the partner institutions as well as Australian and New Zealand universities more widely. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present outcomes of the successfully completed OLT project on assessing final year engineering projects to ensure learning and teaching standards and quality outcomes are achieved from FYEPs. Furthermore, the paper aims to disseminate the project outcomes since completion in January 2015. Approach: The project's most significant achievements are threefold, namely (i) production of guidelines for curriculum, supervision and assessment together with exemplar practices; (ii) meaningful dissemination workshops presented at a couple of earlier AAEE conferences and in different states and territories of Australia and New Zealand; and (iii) scholarly outputs. These will be elaborated in the paper. More specifically, the ways in which curriculum designers, project supervisors and subject coordinators have worked together to address AQF8 requirements within FYEPs using the guidelines will be addressed. Some gaps have emerged that suggest scope for further work. Results: The project provided a mapping and review of existing learning and teaching practices followed by the development and promotion of guidelines to assist engineering disciplines to improve FYEP learning and teaching methods and assessment. Lessons learned and recommendations for achieving quality outcomes from FYEPs will be discussed. Conclusions: The outputs from this project are expected to continue to assist FYEPs coordinators in meeting curriculum, supervision and assessment requirements stipulated by AQF level 8