During the month of June, the ENHANCE project hosted three virtual workshops focusing on teaching methods to bring greater innovation and quality to engineering curricula. Up to 120 participants from many countries and institutions joined us online for talks and interactive learning sessions.

The first workshop was on interdisciplinary teaching and learning. Participants identified that this practice could help students to have a broader understanding of their own subject field, as well as experience and understanding of how to work in a cross disciplinary team. They discussed how interdisciplinary teaching could be achieved, and tried to model how it could be incorporated into their own curricula.

The second workshop on Problem based learning looked at PBL as a method for delivering complex curricula. It was suggested that a large scale PBL project could be included in the late stages of the degree. In PBL a problem is proposed to students that may have many different solutions, they have to gather and apply the appropriate knowledge and skill to develop their own viable solution. Participants learned that this methodology can lead to a longer lasting subject knowledge, greater understanding of complex ideas and the acquisition of soft skills that are valuable in professional life.

With its focus on sharing best practice, participants in our third workshop were able to identify the merits of learning from each other, being open about our own strengths and weaknesses and taking on student feedback. Furthermore, they were able to participate in live teaching sessions and analyse the practices showcased to understand and improve the classroom experience.

Feedback from participants showed high rates of satisfaction with the workshops, and made us aware of other topics that we could cover in the future.

At Project ENHANCE we remain committed to improving teaching and learning methods in engineering programmes, believing that this is our most valuable tool in instilling in future engineering graduates a humanitarian sense of their communities and environments.