Innovative residential schools for engineering degree courses

Abstract

The terms ‘external studies’, ‘off-campus course’, ‘flexible delivery’, ‘university without walls’ and so on have been extensively used to describe courses offered by universities or colleges of advanced education through non-traditional mode of delivery. The media of delivery range from the use of traditional text books and study guides to the use of modern technologies like videos, CD-ROMs, computer mediated conferencing, the Internet, SMART 2000 video conferencing, computer managed learning, home experiment kits, computer simulation and experimental log books. With some disciplines, particularly those not involving practical work, the above media of delivery are adequate but with science and technology based disciplines like mechanical engineering, attendance at residential schools for practical work becomes inevitable because by ‘playing with’ some hardware students can better understand the underlying principles of certain theories better, can reinforce their learning and enhance their design skills. In the Faculty of Engineering and Surveying (FOES), University of Southern Queensland (USQ), residential school sessions had traditionally been used as the major means of satisfying the practical requirement of engineering degree courses. Those residential school sessions were unit based and had brought with them inherited problems and inconvenience to our students, particularly international students. Course based residential schools, called Practice units, were therefore developed to cope with the problems and inconvenience. In this paper the term course is used to denote a systematic programme of study extending over a number of years that leads to the award of a degrees. The term unit denotes a component of a course that receives an official grade. A unit is sometimes referred to as a module or subject by other institutions.