Lambert, Christopher and Rennie, Allan and Ma, Xiandong (2013) A Design Academy: Increasing the Commercial Exposure of Engineering Students. In: Proceedings of The 9th International CDIO Conference: Engineering Leadership in Innovation and Design. UNSPECIFIED. (Submitted)
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
It is understood that engineering student competencies at the end of an undergraduate degree course should be a well-balanced mixture of underpinning science along with the development of necessary skills to allow successful transition into employment. In a recent UK government review, Wilson (2012) outlined a series of recommendations to help UK business-university collaboration become world leading; many of the thirty substantive recommendations put forward are done so to bring benefits to the student, business and the university. Flexibility for institutions to develop programmes and schemes appropriate to local requirements is stressed throughout. The Engineering Department at Lancaster University accepts around one hundred undergraduate students onto a variety of general engineering degree schemes annually. Responding and aiming to realise several benefits of closer collaboration with industry, the Department has recently developed the concept of an Engineering Design Academy (EDA), a model which aims to bring undergraduate students closer to the business world in which most of them will be destined. The EDA is funded jointly by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and Lancaster University, managed by a dedicated knowledge exchange team and intends to place students on short-term projects with small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) typically of up to around 140 hours. The aim of the EDA is to successfully place around 50 students between 2013 and 2015 with businesses that would benefit from the knowledge, innovative capacity and resource of an engineering undergraduate student. It further builds on a scheme that runs for MEng-level students within the Engineering Department that is part of the core curriculum. The aim with the EDA is to go beyond the boundaries of their degree and embed within students the skills required by employers whilst delivering tangible benefits to regional businesses. The paper will outline the rationale for this academy approach and detail the specifics of the support that will be available to, and planned activity with, undergraduate students. It will draw on the shorter MEng-level scheme to consider how proven best practice can be transferred and integrated into the academy model, which builds on years of experience of delivering small-scale projects with industry; these learning outcomes will be presented. This will include case study examples of how students have made meaningful contributions to product development and process improvement with commercial organisations and how they themselves have become more readily aware of expectations placed upon them by future prospective employers. References Wilson T. (2012) A Review of Business-University Collaboration UK Government Department for Business Innovation and Skills
| Item Type: | Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) |
| Departments: | Faculty of Science and Technology > Engineering |
| ID Code: | 59824 |
| Deposited By: | ep_importer_pure |
| Deposited On: | 05 Nov 2012 09:03 |
| Refereed?: | No |
| Published?: | Submitted |
| Last Modified: | 18 Dec 2012 09:31 |
| Identification Number: | |
| URI: | http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/59824 |
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