ANALYSIS OF FUTURE CONSTRUCTION POSSIBILITIES ON THE COLBY COLLEGE CAMPUS

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LIGHT COVERAGE ON COLBY COLLEGE CAMPUS

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WIND TURBINE VISIBILITY ON THE COLBY CAMPUS

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Is off-campus engineering study off the agenda? Professional accreditation and distance education

In engineering, distance/off-campus study is an essential element of access to education for those in remote locations and/or seeking to upgrade their qualifications via the lifelong learning route whilst employed. Internationally, engineering education accrediting bodies have moved toward outcomes-based assessment of graduate competency, but are still struggling to relinquish their historical attachment to the measurement of inputs. A genuinely outcomes-based accreditation system based on the demonstrated individual student attainment of appropriate graduate attributes (which might be delivered/gained by a range of means) offers the best way forward for an equitable, representative and socially just undergraduate engineering education system that encourages suitably qualified candidates from a range of social, employment, educational, gender, age and geographic circumstances to aspire to the professional sphere of the engineering workforce. Until outcomes-based education becomes the norm in engineering, it is likely that distance learners in engineering will face significant difficulties.

What is the on-campus experience? Engineering student study and work

Accreditation for off-campus engineering programmes has proven to be problematic. In Australia, off-campus programmes are compelled to contain mandatory residential sessions so that offcampus students can have an `on-campus experience'. This paper explores the nature of modern oncampus undergraduate engineering study, and finds that it now typically involves at least part-time employment and has more in common with off-campus study than the on-campus experience enjoyed by most of the current institutional (education and professional) administrators when they completed their undergraduate studies. Rather than ignore student term-time work, engineering programmes should use it to enhance the development of desirable graduate attributes.

Exploring study approaches of on campus and off shore students

Based on a revised SPQ2F instrument (Biggs, 2003, Biggs and Leung, 2001) this exploratory study investigates the differences of the study approaches of on campus and offshore students and their perceptions of the delivery of a marketing unit in an Australian university. The results indicate that there are no significant differences in students’ general approaches to study though their study methods may differ according to the learning contexts and the prior learning backgrounds. The also study reveals that majority of students seem to adopt deep learning than surface learning approaches, though in comparison on campus students appear to have deep learning orientations than the off shore campus students.

The development of biological objectives for streams in a single catchment: a case study on the catchment of western port bay, Victoria, Australia

Government environment protection policies for waterways have traditionally relied on water quality indicators and their objectives. In this paper we describe the development of biological objectives based on invertebrate indicators for inclusion in a government policy for the catchment of Western Port Bay, Victoria. The first step of defining segments (areas with streams in which the same objectives are applied) was problematic, requiring two different approaches, as follows. Site groups initially based on invertebrate community composition derived using multivariate techniques (ordination and classification) proved to be unsuitable for policy segments. Segment boundaries were subsequently defined using topographical (e.g. boundary of foothills and lowland plains), climate (e.g. rainfall) and land-use (e.g. urban) features. We used information and data from reference sites inside as well outside the catchment to derive specific biological objectives based on aquatic invertebrates for these segments. Objectives were specified for the following four indicators – number of invertebrate families, the SIGNAL index, the AUSRIVAS predictive model and the number of key families.