Exploring Student Co-Design of Final Year Major Project Modules

Workshop Recommended citation: Cairns, M., Pick, L., McCartan, C., & Cunningham, E. (2025). Exploring Student Co-Design of Final Year Major Project Modules. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17631437. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Exploring Student Co-Design of Final Year Major Project Modules M J Cairns a, 1 , L T Pick a, C D McCartan a, E Cunningham a a Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland 0009-0002-1934-0075 0000-0003-0629-4698 0000-0003-4079-6843 0000-0003-2555-7705 Conference Key Areas: Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills. Improving higher engineering education through researching engineering education. Keywords: PBL, Project Based Learning, Final Year Projects, Student Partnership, Co-Design ABSTRACT Final Year Major Project Modules (MPMs) are key components of engineering degree programmes, giving students the opportunity to develop a wide range of competencies including: technical, interpersonal, organisational, planning, analytical and risk assessment skills, alongside interprofessional competence and ethical sensitivity (Picard et al., 2022). Although projects provide a multitude of benefits for students, they can prove challenging from an institutional point of view, and many administrative challenges are associated with facilitating projects. These include pairing project fields and supervisors with students, and ensuring that project scopes and student workloads are fair and equal across cohorts. Assessing projects can also be complex, as it involves ensuring students are credited for their efforts while maintaining assessment integrity and a consistent approach to appraisal. Optionality, in some form, often features during the MPM process. Within the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the authors’ institution, students are presented with a list of projects, designed and outlined by academics within the school. Students rank several projects in order of preference and are assigned projects via an algorithm. Students within the school are also offered the opportunity to self-propose a project, or participate in an industrially backed project. This option has not had a high uptake from students, and the authors’ are keen to explore why 1 Corresponding Author M J Cairns [email protected] this is the case. This workshop aims to host an interactive and informative discussion focussing on MPMs, how implementing optionality and co-design could benefit staff and students within these modules, and discussing solutions to the difficulties this could present. 1 BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE 1.1 Background Current research shows optionality and co-design has the potential to enable increased engagement or interest, more inclusive assessments, improved student wellbeing, increased motivation, improved student satisfaction, deepened understanding, reduced stress and shared responsibility (Bovill et al., 2009; Firth et al., 2023; Lu et al., 2015). Optionality and co-design are already embedded within Major Project Modules (MPMs) at a number of institutions and this workshop seeks to gain insight into the perceived challenges and benefits involved. The authors are involved in research to explore student co-design of MPMs. The aim of their work is to provide important insight into the potential impact of embedding student co-design within the development of individual MPMs. 1.2 Context Within the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the authors’ institution, as previously discussed, the majority of students choose to select their project from a list, ranking projects in order of their preference. A new minimum-cost maximum-flow algorithm was introduced in 2020, replacing a grade based system which gave preference to higher performing students. Since this introduction, 94%, 97% and 98% of students in the years 2020-2021, 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 respectively were allocated a project from their top 6 preferences, a significant increase from 87% in 2019-2020. As mentioned earlier, students have the option to design and propose their own project, but this is a largely underutilised option. Between 2020-2024, a total of 11 students chose to propose their own project, with the remaining students selecting from the pre-defined list (approximately 200 students per year). This is despite research suggesting extensive benefits to students and students who self-propose with these students tending to achieve higher grades. 1.3 Rationale MPMs have a huge weighting on student outcomes and are vital to students developing both technical and non-technical skills, such as organisation, planning, collaboration, communication, interprofessional competence and problem solving (Picard et al., 2022). MPMs take various forms across universities and the aim of this project is to define the current state of the art in the area alongside identifying innovative practices. The workshop forms part of a wider research project, aiming to understand the impact student optionality and/or co-design with students can have when utilised within MPMs, whilst also presenting ideas and findings to date. 2 WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES 2.1 Target audience Participant numbers are not limited, although 12-24 participants would be preferable. The target audience for the workshop includes any staff at higher education institutions, involved in any capacity with MPMs for example: supervision, administering or designing projects. Student delegates would also be welcome to attend, given their first-hand experience with projects. The aim of conducting this workshop at the conference is to gain a diverse insight, ensuring future output is both relevant and useful for most other institutions in addition to the authors’. 2.2 Expected learning outcomes Attendees are invited to participate in this workshop to provide their views and engage in a lively critical debate about this with colleagues from across the sector. Helping to frame and shape best practice in this area and gain important ideas and insights into how the process of conducting and assessing MPMs can be improved for both staff and students. All attendees will benefit from these conversations, with the discussion being relevant for anyone involved in engineering education. Although specifically targeting major project modules, the workshop content is applicable to a variety of other contexts. As part of a larger project, perspectives from both staff and students will feed into a new framework for embedding co-design and optionality within MPMs. The framework will elucidate the potential benefits gathered from workshops such as this one, alongside common challenges identified and suggestions for counteracting some of these. Workshop participants will be kept informed of developments/outputs as the project progresses after the conference. Interested participants will also have the opportunity to continue contributing through follow-up interviews. 3 WORKSHOP DESIGN 3.1 Time plan This workshop will begin with an introduction, outlining how MPMs are currently run in the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the authors’ institution, and exploring the potential of introducing optionality and co-design. Literature demonstrating the benefits of optionality and co-design will be discussed. Participants will then engage in several activities in groups and will share their results with the room. Participants will be arranged into groups of approximately 4. Total time required 1hr. The groups will be invited to participate in three tasks designed to gather information and opinions on three areas. Table 1. Workshop time plan Run time Activity 10 min Introduction 10 min Interactive activity 1: Barriers and benefits of optionality 5 min Discussion/feedback 10 min Interactive activity 2: Student skills 5 min Discussion/feedback 10 min Interactive activity 3: Developing a structure 10 min Discussion and conclusions 3.2 Interactive activity outline The following activities will be undertaken in groups, promoting conversation between attendees both within groups and during the discussion sections where each group will feed back to the room. Activity 1: Barriers and benefits of optionality Groups will be prompted to explore the barriers to and benefits of implementing optionality and co-design in Major Project Module allocation and assessment, drawing on the experience and varying perspectives of group members. Activity 2: Student skills Groups will consider the skills would students need in order to successfully design and scope a project themselves alongside considering how well current programmes prepare students for self-proposing and developing projects, and where current gaps lie. Activity 3: Developing a structure Groups will consider what mechanisms or learning opportunities would need to be introduced to support students and staff in introducing optionality and co-design. 3.3 Ethical approval Ethical approval for this research study has been granted. The project will form part of a PhD thesis which will be published and in addition it is hoped that a manuscript that will be submitted to peer reviewed journals and abstracts will be submitted for presentation at conferences, and other means of dissemination. Careful consideration will be taken to ensure data is anonymised to protect participants’ anonymity. All personal information that is collected during the research study will be kept strictly confidential. Names or any other identifiable information will not be related to any comments, nor will they appear on any report or publication resulting from the study. This research study is being co-ordinated by Matthew Cairns, a PhD Student from the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast (SMAE) under the supervision of Dr Louise Pick (PI), Dr Charlie McCartan and Dr Eoin Cunningham, also from SMAE. 4 WORKSHOP RESULTS In total, 10 delegates were present at the workshop during the conference, forming 3 groups. During each activity, groups were asked to write their findings on post it notes to aid data collection. A selection of these are shown below. Activity 1 A number of ideas were presented by the groups for both barriers and benefits to implementation. These are presented in Table 1, similar ideas from multiple groups are shown in the same cell. Table 1: Activity 1 results Barriers Benefits Experience needed Increased motivation Intrinsic motivation Increased motivation Finding a supervisor x2 Saves academic time Offload thinking (staff) Slightly less academic workload during proposals Feasibility Very invested Prior misconceptions Not academic enough Idea from real world context Timelines Creativity/diversity of ideas New ideas Perceived as offloading academic responsibility More perceived choice/freedom Freedom to choose and evolve the project Resource Student choice could deepen their existing knowledge Overwhelming for students Optimism/Drive to make world better Supervisor changes focus of project Appropriate use of GenAI to find, scope & structure projects Lack of imagination/creativity Lack of interest Not compliant with university standards Repeated project with no innovation Activity 2/Activity 3 Several skills were identified by groups and were then placed on a grid as shown in Figure 1, ranking both importance of the skill and how developed the skill is in graduates. Interventions, or ideas of how the very important and not well developed skills could be taught are shown on the smaller post it notes. Very well developed Not very well developed Very important Not very important Very well developed Not very well developed Very important Not very important Very well developed Not very well developed Very important Not very important Figure 1: Activity 2 and 3 results REFERENCES Bovill, C., Morss, K., & Bulley, C. (2009). Should students participate in curriculum design? Should students participate in curriculum design? Discussion arising from a first year curriculum design project and a literature review. Pedagogical Research in Maximising Education, 3(2), 17–26. Firth, M. , Ball-Smith, J., Burgess, T., Chaffer, C., Finn, G., Guy, M., Hansen, J., Havemann, L., Glover, N., Kingsbury, M., Pazio, M., Penn, J., Trzeciak, F., Shackleford-Cesare, K., Walker, S., & Webb, J. (2023). Optionality in Assessment: a cross institutional exploration of the feasibility, practicality & utility of student choices in assessment in UK higher education. Lu, C. Y., Nguyen, Q., & Ersin, O. H. (2015). Active student engagement in curriculum development. American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, 79(2). https://doi.org/10.5688/ajpe79230 Picard, C., Hardebolle, C., Tormey, R., & Schiffmann, J. (2022). Which professional skills do students learn in engineering team-based projects? European Journal of Engineering Education, 47(2), 314–332. https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2021.1920890