ICED 17 - Collaborative Design Education

21st August 2017 at 2pm

Collaborative design education requires students to work together in teams on design projects to tackle problem-solving tasks. This pedagogical practice acknowledges that learning is a social activity during which students will be able to improve their engineering design skills. This has many advantages for improving students’ academic learning and team working as well as social integration with their peers. However, the nature of the work and how this work is shared can make it difficult to ensure that individual team members learning benefited from participating in this learning environment. 

From a pedagogical perspective, this raises interesting questions regarding how we should engage our students both in terms of solving problems and the collaborative process, as well as the associated assessment of group project work. To ensure all students benefit we should ask; what might be appropriate learning outcomes and assessments to support students’ learning? What range of practices academics could implement in prior and during the collaborative design student’s projects? 

This cross-SIG workshop aimed to provide a novel forum for Collaborative Design and Design Education researchers to come together and discuss the context of their research, and exchange ideas relating to different experiences preparing and conducting collaborative project based learning classes.

Workshop format:
The workshop lasted two hours and was formatted as follows:

• An introduction on the challenges of ensuring fairness in collaborative project work and then groups were formed to discuss the workshop questions.
• Participants in the workshop engaged in a discussion about the benefits and challenges associated with collaborative design education and how we might improve the practice in the future.
• Participants were asked to share the findings of their group so that all who attend can benefit from the findings and might take away some knowledge to implement in their teaching and research.