Development of a multidisciplinary assignment | A first year Engineering pilot study

Australia/Sydney 2.00pm | Thu 12 Mar 2020
Canada/Vancouver 8.00pm | Wed 11 Mar 2020
UK/London 3.00am | Thu 12 Mar 2020
(Convert your timezone here)

Presenter:
Dr Saad Odeh – Program Convenor for IT & Engineering (SIBT)
Dr Muhammad Qureshi – Unit Supervisor / Lecturer – Programming (SIBT)

Multidisciplinary teaching is a contemporary education strategy implemented by various tertiary institutions to stimulate students’ critical thinking, develop inter-disciplinary understanding, and enhance students’ problem solving skills. In this webinar, Dr Saad Odeh and Dr Muhammad Qureshi will present steps taken as well as findings from a pilot study that investigated the development and implementation of a combined assignment from two first year units in the Engineering curriculum: “Foundation Mathematics” and “Introduction to Programming”.

The suggested assignment aimed to help students understand the link between these two disciplines. Case studies from the mechanical and civil engineering industry were selected to develop the pilot assignments. The mathematical rules applied in this assignment were introduced in brief in the assignment information sheet to give students guidelines to carry out further online research. The preliminary statistical results show improvement in students’ multi-disciplinary knowledge in the different units and enhancement in their industrial experience.

Biography: Dr Saad Odeh is the Senior Program Convenor for IT and Engineering at Sydney Institute of Business and Technology and a lecturer at Western Sydney University – Sydney City Campus. He has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New South Wales. Dr Odeh worked as a lecturer and Associate Professor at various national and international universities and published several papers in the area of Engineering education as well as Renewable Energy and Energy Sustainability.