A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

18
Key aspects of
teaching and
learning in
engineering
John Dickens and Carol Arlett
CONTEXT
Curricula in engineering have for many years been heavily influenced by the
requirements of accreditation by the professional institutions. Historically, accreditation
guidelines have prescribed minimum contents of subdisciplines, admissions standards
and even contact hours. In recent years there has been a significant move away from
prescription and admission standards to output standards. The QAA Subject
Benchmarking statements for engineering, first published in 2000, defined a set of
standards in terms of knowledge and understanding, intellectual abilities, practical skills
and general transferable skills that an engineering graduate should have attained. Almost
in parallel, the Engineering Professors’ Council produced a set of output standards and
in 2004 the Engineering Council published UK-SPEC (ECUK, 2004) which adopted output
standards for professional accreditation for the first time. The existence of three sets of
output standards, despite being broadly similar, caused concern that was resolved in
2006 when all three parties agreed to adopt UK-SPEC as the output standard and the
QAA published a revised benchmark statement that formalised this (QAA, 2006). The
move to output standards has led to degree programmes being defined in terms of a set
of learning outcomes (see Chapter 4). This has had an impact on programme design and
on assessment strategies that enable students to demonstrate the attainment of learning
outcomes.
The majority of degree programmes are accredited as providing the educational base
that allows a graduate to progress to Chartered or Incorporated Engineer status after a
period of professional practice. Accreditation confirms that graduates from a degree
programme meet the defined output standards. However, a programme does not
have to be accredited for it to meet the standards specified in the QAA benchmark
statement.
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