New Engineers for a
Changing World
Professor Gary C Wood
Academic Director, New Model Institute for Technology & Engineering
gary.wood@nmite.ac.uk | @GC_Wood | www.garycwood.uk

Overview
• My background/expertise
• The need for a new approach to engineering education
• Authentic learning and assessment
• The importance of professional capabilities
• NMITE’s approach: an example from a new provider
• Driving change through innovation.

About me!
• Professor of Learning and Development
• SFHEA and National Teaching Fellow
• A linguist by background – PhD in language
development in children
• Education and academic development – working
particularly with engineers and internationally
• Co-founder and Head of Sheffield Engineering
Leadership Academy (2014-2021)
• Now Academic Director of NMITE.

Interests
• Enterprise education
• Authentic learning and assessment for learning
• Developing professional capabilities
• Industry engagement in learning
• Technology-enhanced learning
• Innovation in learning and teaching.

The need for a new approach
1. Industry relevance
• Traditional disciplines perceived as silos – relevant for
academic research but less for modern industry
requirements
• Students struggle to ‘break into’ problems, as new
graduates, to determine how to approach solving them
(Wood & Gibbs 2019)
• Modular structures mean learning problems are not truly open-
ended
• Learning experiences lack opportunities for integration
• Graduates draw on only a fraction of what they learn in a
traditional degree programme, and they know only a
fraction of collective knowledge in their discipline.

The need for a new approach
2. Skills Gaps
• IET Skills and Demand in Industry report 2019:
• 59% of companies report graduates with academic knowledge but
inadequate workplace skills
• Graduates found to have gaps in professional capabilities
• 49% of employers in the 2021 survey report a lack of teamworking
skills
• But also communication, literacy, numeracy/data handling, personal
effectiveness etc.
• See also: RAEng reports (2007, 2010, 2019); Graham (2012);
Perkins (2013).

The need for a new approach
3. We need to widen access to engineering education
• UK has a shortfall in the number of engineers (RAEng 2019)
• Women represent only 23.5% of undergraduates on
engineering programmes
• There have been lots of initiatives by universities through
WP activities, outreach, etc. – little impact against the scale
of the problem
• Key challenge perceived to be the lack of girls taking A-
Levels in maths and physics (Engineering UK 2023).

The need for a new approach
4. Institutional factors and traditions
• Traditional approaches to teaching persist
• Teaching spaces are often shared so there are resource
pressures
• Timetabling is fixed and determines the teaching schedule,
often into 50-minute blocks
• Recruitment patterns – high student numbers combined
with teaching schedules and resource pressures often lead
to efficiency overtaking pedagogical value in learning
design.

What does a new
approach look like?
Two key components: authentic learning and
professional capabilities

Authentic learning & assessment
• “Authentic learning is an [educational] approach that
allows students to explore, discuss, and meaningfully
construct concepts and relationships in contexts that
involve real-world problems and projects that are
relevant to the learner.” (Donovan, Bransford, &
Pellegrino, 1999)

Authentic learning benefits
• Industry relevance – real(istic) problems
• Interdisciplinarity:
• Less contrived problems prepare students for the challenge
they’ll face in industry
• Real(istic) problems don’t neatly fit in (academic)
disciplinary boundaries
• Learning often becomes less constrained by ILOs as
targets (for students)
• The purpose is producing a valuable solution/output,
rather that achieving a grade – so motivation changes.

Authentic assessment
• Authentic learning creates opportunities for authentic
assessment
• Authentic assessment is often assessment for
learning rather than of learning
• Allows students to build their skills in producing
professionally-relevant outputs (reports, simulations,
models, prototypes, presentations, drawings, media
pieces, meeting contributions, etc).

Professional capabilities
• Technical knowledge alone is not enough for
graduates to succeed in the workplace
• They need to be able to operate in a professional
environment:
• Communicating effectively with different audiences
• Collaboration
• Individual effectiveness and self-awareness (reflective
practice, CPD)
• Having high levels of information literacy
• Being enterprising: turning ideas into action.

Professional capabilities
• A spine of development
• Staged across FHEQ
Levels 4-7
• 25% of the learning
outcomes for an MEng
programme in this
example (University of
Sheffield).

Professional capabilities
• These skills are as important as technical competence
• Traditionally, an assumption that professional skills are
acquired on a learning by doing basis – but that’s painful
for everyone!
• Training is not just about the future – it equips our
students with skills to be better students
• Learning experiences need to develop skills – embedded
within, and not alongside, the technical curriculum
• Crucial that students not only have but can articulate and
exemplify these skills, linked to their own career
aspirations.

Portfolios for prof. capabilities
• Skills are developed over time and become capabilities as
students are able to deploy them across
different contexts
• Assessing professional capabilities in line with AHEP needs
thought – because they are not developed in one place in a
specific module
• Portfolios are a good solution:
• Individual modules become the space where development of the skills
happens
• Across modules, they become capabilities
• The capabilities are then assessed through reflective portfolios that
students build, drawing on example outputs from other modules
• In later years, this can provide space for personalisation
of learning, aligned with career aspirations.

“But there’s too much content?!”
• Authentic learning and professional capability
development are not necessarily in competition with
technical content in programmes
• It’s not about what is taught but how it is taught
• But: we can reduce technical content, much of which
is arbitrary anyway
• We need to teach students to:
• Think like an engineer (drawing on technical knowledge)
• Behave like an engineer (applying knowledge and
professional capabilities).

A Case Study of NMITE’s
new model

About NMITE
• New, small, specialist provider in Hereford – previously
had no Higher Education Institution
• Engineering and technology focus supports the UK
economy and aims to nurture ‘work-ready’ engineers
• Founded to catalyse Herefordshire’s economic,
educational and social ecosystem
• First students started September 2021 (accelerated
MEng Integrated Engineering).

NMITE’s Guiding Principles
• Be a significant centre for innovative, mould-breaking
engineering education
• Explore the ways engineering is connected to other
disciplines and society
• Teaching and learning that is of long-term value in a
rapidly changing society and profession
• Deep integration of employers and communities in
teaching and learning.

Why Integrated Engineering?
• Current offer is degrees in
Integrated Engineering (degrees
in Sustainable Built Environment
from September 2023)
• Develop a rounded skillset from
which to build an engineering
career
• Industry-linked with real challenge
problems as a focus for learning
• Be able to solve problems as
they’re encountered as a
professional engineer
• In demand from industry.

Our approach to learning
• Learning in a studio environment
• Collaborative space, capacity 25-30
• 9-5, 5 days per week
• Practical activities, theory
seminars, doing an industry
challenge
• One module of learning at a time
• Varied assessment strategy,
related to professional
formats/outputs.

Industry challenges – examples
• Optimise pipe flow for a drinks manufacturer
• Produce and validate a design for a mobile climbing wall
• Design and build a moisture sensor for a timber-framed
building
• Develop a channel model to predict whether a satellite
communications link will work
• Respecify material for a torque arm.

Social but personal learning
• Substantial contact time with
educators
• Work in teams and
independently
• Personal tutor to support
• Personalised skills support
through the ASK Centre
• Student services close by.

Student recruitment
• A-Level maths and physics not required
• We support maths learning, contextualised and focused on
thinking mathematically, using maths as a tool
• We offer an RPEL route for students without traditional
qualifications
• Bursaries to support underrepresented groups,
including women.

Applying NMITE principles
• We had the benefit of starting a whole new institution
• In an established context:
• Incremental change and retrofitting AL, AfL and professional
capabilities is hard, and you will meet resistance
• Much easier as part of a programme refresh
• Start by agreeing a Programme Ethos with everyone involved:
• It empowers the design team to make decisions without wide
consultation every time
• It helps to navigate the push-back to changing technical
content in the curriculum
• Involve students as equal partners in the design process (see
Wood & Gibbs 2019; Gibbs & Wood 2021)
• Get your quality team involved early and take them on the
journey with you.

A Programme Ethos
• A dynamic, outward-facing statement of the
programmes’ purpose and values and the learning
environment we aspire to. Should communicate in
clear language:
• the programme’s purpose(s)
• educational and discipline and professional values
• nature of the learning environment for students
• key approaches to teaching, learning and assessment
• Not easy to develop – but worth the initial investment
to save time (and arguments!) later
• See O’Neill (2015).

A call to action…
• If we’re going to create new engineers for a changing
world…
• We need to:
• Let go of trying to teach them about all research specialisms in
departments
• Deliver solid foundations in engineering science
• Use the topics we teach as a context to develop skills in
engineering thinking
• Infuse learning experiences with professional skills development
• Connect learning to engineering in industry
• Help students understand their own potential and find
where they fit.

References
Donovan, M. S., Bransford, J. D. & Pellegrino, James W. (Eds.). (1999). How People Learn: Bridging Research & Practice. Washington DC: National Academy Press.
Engineering UK (2023). 115,000 More Girls Need to Study Maths or Physics A Levels to Bridge Gender Gap in Higher Education. Retrieved from
https://www.engineeringuk.com/news-views/115-000-more-girls-need-to-study-maths-or-physics-a-levels-to-bridge-gender-gap-in-higher-education/
Gibbs, B. & Wood, G. C. (2021). How Can Student Partnerships Stimulate Organisational Learning in Higher Education Institutions? Teaching in Higher Education, 1–14.
Graham, R. (2012). Achieving Excellence in Engineering Education: The Ingredients of Successful Change. London: Royal Academy of Engineering.
Habbershaw, D.L., Sharp, B.F. & Wood, G.C. (2019). Leading the Way with Integrative Projects to support Skills Development. Conference presentation at Enhancing Student
Learning Through Innovative Scholarship, Edinburgh, 18-19 July 2019. Available at www.garycwood.uk.
Kent-Waters, J., Seago, O,. & Smith, L. (2018) A Compendium of Assessment Techniques in Higher Education from Students’ Perspectives. Edited by Samantha Pugh. Leeds:
Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence.Available at: https://teachingexcellence.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/89/2018/10/PUGHcompendiumcomplete.pdf.
O’Neill, Geraldine (2015). Curriculum Design in Higher Education: Theory to Practice, 1st Edition. Chapter 3: Needs Analysis and Educational Philosophy. Dublin: UCD Learning &
Teaching. Available at: https://researchrepository.ucd.ie/rest/bitstreams/20093/retrieve.
The IET (2019). Skills and demand in industry: 2019 Survey. Stevenage: The Institution of Engineering and Technology. Available at: www.theiet.org/media/4812/skills-
survey2019.pdf.
Perkins, J. (2013). Professor John Perkins’s Review of Engineering Skills. Available at:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/254885/bis-13-1269-professor-john-perkins-review-of-engineering-
skills.pdf
Royal Academy of Engineering. (2007). Educating Engineers for the 21st Century. London: Royal Academy of Engineering.
Royal Academy of Engineering. (2010). Engineering Graduates for Industry. London: Royal Academy of Engineering.
Royal Academy of Engineering. (2019). Engineering Skills for the Future: The 2012 Perkins Review Revisited. London: Royal Academy of Engineering
Wood, G. C. & Gibbs, B. (2019). Students as Partners in the Design and Practice of Engineering Education: Understanding and Enabling Development of Intellectual Abilities, in:
Malik, M., Andrews, J., Clark, R., and Broadbent, R. (Eds.), Realising Ambitions: Sixth Annual Symposium of the UK&I Engineering Education Research Network, (pp. 231–245).
Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth.

New Engineers for a
Changing World
Professor Gary C Wood
Academic Director, New Model Institute for Technology & Engineering
gary.wood@nmite.ac.uk | @GC_Wood | www.garycwood.uk