Developing Staff Awareness of Communication Competency and Reviewing Alternative Assessment in PBL

Australian Engineering Industry today demands gr aduates that have highly developed communication sk ills (written, oral and interpersonal). Traditional mode s of teaching have, however, often overlooked the i mportance of these skills and as a result many graduates have had diff iculties finding work or adjusting to workforce req uirements. This deficiency was one of the more important motivators for the decision to incorporate Problem Based Lear ning (PBL) into all of the undergraduate engineering programs at Victor ia University. The introduction of PBL was thus int ended to facilitate the development of students' generic skills, whilst maintaining technical competence, and hence increa se their employability. In order to improve the understanding of student co mmunicative competence, it was recognised that engi neering staff would need to enhance their own skills in the teaching of language and communications skills. To support thi s, a series of workshops on education theory and the teaching of c ommunications skills were run in 2006. As well as c overing the concepts and vocabulary of language education, these worksho ps covered an analysis of how student language and associated social skills could be evaluated and improved. This discus sion was supportive to a review of the assessment o f PBL units in the School of Electrical Engineering (SEE) by the team developing the Second Year PBL units. In the First Year units in 2006 a system using Structure of the Observed Learning Out come (SOLO) had been used in the assessment of PBL units of study. As a consequence of discussions in the workshops this was enhanced by the development of Rubrics. This cr eated a "Rubric informed SOLO" mechanism which was used in semester 1 of 2007 for second year students.