Guidelines for teaching with ill-structured real-world engineering problems: insights from a redesigned engineering project management course

M.V. Pereira Pessoa*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
44 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Real-world design settings can be complex, ill-structured, open and typically uncertain and/or ambiguous about their goals and solution paths. This study contributes to understanding how to work with these types of problems in a course project setting. The main objective of the study is to identify, propose and validate a set of practical guidelines for dealing with ill-structured, open-problem project assignments in courses that teach design engineering or design development planning. A literature review identifies key practices for proposing the guidelines, which are then validated by intervening in an engineering project management master’s course. The intervention took place during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions with 12 project groups created from 105 enrolled students. During the validation, qualitative and quantitative feedback was gathered from the students, and the results provide positive evidence for achieving the objective. Key to this outcome was the combination of the self-regulation of learning, co-regulation of learning and socially shared regulation of learning. In this sense, the proposed guidelines look promising for redesigning university courses that deal with open problems, thus enhancing students’ capacity for handling uncertainty and ambiguity.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)761-778
Number of pages18
JournalEuropean journal of engineering education
Volume48
Issue number4
Early online date5 Apr 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 4 Jul 2023

Keywords

  • Co-regulation of learning
  • Flipped classroom
  • Ill-structured problems
  • Project-based learning
  • Self-regulation of learning
  • Socially shared regulation of learning
  • UT-Hybrid-D

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