Aligning students and staff perspectives in an engineering design curriculum

This paper focuses on the alignment of students and staff perspectives in an engineering design curriculum. Deakin University recognised the importance of student learning with engagement in design-centred education. Staff across the university are committed to ensure that students are engaged at a fairly deep learning level. Engaging students is an important aspect of learning and teaching process because it enhances the student to be self directed active learners. To measure the student engagement and staff experiences in learning and teaching process, Deakin engineering has used design based learning as one of its engineering learning principle. This study examines students perceptions of DBL in their curriculum through a paper based survey given to a cohort of senior year undergraduate engineering students. The research also illustrates the staff perceptions of DBL in engineering curriculum by conducting face-to-face interviews with them. From the analysed results, this research shows that the students and staff have an adequate experience of learning and teaching engineering through design based learning approach in an engineering design curriculum.