09/99/8.2                

Engineering Professors’ Council

Assessment of Learning Outcomes in Engineering (ALOE) Report – January 2009

Current activities

Workshops on the assessment of learning outcomes continue to be provided on demand at universities and for professional bodies (including the EAB). The most recent workshop was held at the ICE on 16th December.

The document defining the key terms used in the assessment area has been finalised and will be put on the Engineering Subject Centre website.

The ALOE Conference

This was jointly organised by the Engineering Subject Centre, the ECuk and the EPC and took place on Thursday 27th November at the Goodenough College, London. Although the attendance was disappointing at about 50, there were an unexpectedly high number of delegates from overseas including Denmark, Estonia, France, Poland, Portugal and Sweden. The attraction appeared to be the current Bologna discussions which have led to the need to develop qualifications frameworks based on output standards.

The conference provided the opportunity for practitioners to present examples and share good practice in assessing the achievement of learning outcomes in engineering. It provided delegates with the opportunity to engage with new ideas and research that should help them develop their own approaches to learning outcomes and programme design.

The feedback (provided via feedback forms) was very positive with many delegates suggesting that they would be taking the ideas and approaches discussed back to their own organisations and particularly to some events being planned in other parts of Europe.

Future of the group

The group met on 17th December 2008 to review the feedback on the conference, and also to explore the future of the group as it was anticipated that it would be disbanded following the conference.

The valuable experience gained within the group was not yet fully recorded and ways of achieving this will be explored further. The current need to explore experiential learning with particular reference to assessment (as suggested by the EPC Main Committee) was also discussed.

It was agreed that the present group would meet for the last time in March 2009 when recording the work of the existing group would be the main agenda item together with identifying if there was the need for a fresh group with a new role.

FJM  25.01.’09.