This viewpoint was mainly formed during my time running an electronics lab and evolving that over a few years based upon student feedback. Since I started the PGCert I have had the opportunity to design and run my own module in a more traditional manner. I have tried to keep this mentality at the core of how I designed the module.

Whilst the lab has been my teaching role for many years, I have only recently started lecturing and this is an area I feel I have grown significantly in the recent past. Student feedback, once again, has been invaluable in this. I have included much more clarity on my coursework style and what I deem to be important in their reports and (most importantly) why it is important to me and in their future careers. Particularly in the lecture course, I have found that it is important to maintain a balance between taking student feedback onboard and standing my ground on principles I feel are critical to their success as engineers. This is why I have chosen to increase the clarity of my reasoning for having an investigative report structure rather than altering the courseworks to be more formulaic or question based.

The existing version of this coursework is a simulation task and I have found that the students find it challenging to interpret the simulation results and conceptualise what the results would mean in the real world. This is also a common feedback point when discussing it with the students. Changing to hardware will help to resolve this issue but significantly adds to the challenge of the task.

The more challenging task means, in turn, that the task is better suited to a group activity. I had originally been reticent to do this as students often complain but when I asked them directly in a mentimeter, the majority were happy to work in groups.

Working in groups, in turn allows me to include the ideas presented in Dan Borglunds paper (Borglund, 2007), this is discussed in more detail in the Educational Design assignment. The aim is to include more student guided learning through allowing them to select topics for future lectures to address what they feel they need to know to solve the overall problem. Through a process of iteration each week over a number of weeks the students will work together to simulate the hardware experiment and then implement their solution on the hardware.

This is a significant redesign of the course and thus will impact the whole course. I plan to move other topics to pre-recorded videos and ask the students to watch them in their own time to free up teaching session. Additionally to give more time, I plan to overlap this coursework and another more report based one so each can have a much longer time between the students getting it and the deadline. I will need to monitor the success of this as it goes and take and respond to student feedback during the running and in subsequent years.

This also needs to have a hardware setup design and tested. I have found that the testing phase is very challenging as students in my lab have proven extremely capable of breaking hardware that I have tested and thought suitable. Never wishing to waste a teaching opportunity, I am running an MSc project (with a former EVT student) to develop this hardware over the summer and the result of this will act as my prototype.

This is quite an ambitious redesign so I expect I will need to phase it in, the videos will be introduced this year, and the hardware may be partially introduced this year possibly as a demonstration of their simulation results led by me rather than a full coursework task in itself.

Borglund, D. (2007). A case study of peer learning in higher aeronautical education.

I have considered the concept of a spiral curriculum and scaffolding while creating my lectures but also in working on my wider teaching in labs and in my outreach work on Digital energy with Hitachi. I have found them to be particularly useful when first building these pieces of teaching and putting the first notes together before I flesh out the material fully.

The principle of constructive alignment between the ILOs, the material and the assessment is another that I find to be very useful in planning my teaching. I have tried to maintain this with my lecture module through the setting within a fictional company. This also allows me to create a much more authentic assessment environment which I feel is to the benefit of the students.

In the future, I feel that having access to a significantly improved pedagogical vocabulary (including the word pedagogical itself …) means that I am better equipped to find the resources that will help me inform myself of best practices and allow me to understand the reasoning behind others choices of teaching style. This in turn means I can incorporate the pieces that I find useful and combine them with my own style.

The Digital Wattown game is intended to use a game-like structure to introduce elements of the future of electricity grids and (more importantly) the reasoning behind the change. It is intended for a younger audience and to be mostly student-led and self teaching.

This is a long term project, I am going to run a final year project for a student in the EE department to prototype this (similar to the motors project) over the next academic year. This should be a really interesting project for the right student and allows me to get a feel on how it will come together. After this I will likely need to bring in outside expertise as much of the process is outside my skill set. I look forward to keeping this project rumbling along as I believe it has a lot of promise!

In this diagram there is railway networks, a road network for showing EVs (the horizontal lines), and would also include energy generation at the various scales.