NSW Education Chapter Education News

Message from the Chair

The last three and a half

years has been a very

busy and enjoyable time

for me as chair of this

great chapter. However,

the time has come to

pass the baton to our

next great leader. At the

AGM on the 16th of

November it was

confirmed that Sudipta

Chakraborty will take

over as chair. She has

been our Women in

Engineering Education

Committee Member for

the last 2 years. As chair,

she will also become one

extra female voice within

the Section Committee,

something that is in great

need. I will continue to

serve the chapter within

the role of Past Chair.

Thank you to all

members for your

support over the years.

Sasha Nikolic

Introducing our 2018 Chapter Chair, Sudipta Chakraborty from Macquarie University

Sudipta has been active with the

Education Chapter for the last three

years with the last two as the

representative for Women in

Engineering Education.

The Education Chapter has a real focus on

developing student teachers and Sudipta’ s

rise to power is the best example of this in

action. As a research student and casual

teacher Sudipta played an important role in

organizing many of the chapters activities.

She is now ready and focused to lead our

chapter and take it to a new level.

Sudipta is currently working with Macquarie

University, recently completing a PhD. She

already has nine publications. She is a great

listener and very keen to give other aspiring

young professionals an opportunity to lead.

She has many great plans to advance our

chapter, but can’t do it on her own. If you

have any ideas or would like to contribute

further to the growth and activity of the

chapter please contact her at

sudipta.chakraborty@mq.edu.au. The

change over in leadership will occur on the

1st of January. Changes to other committee

positions will be announced in the new year.

this issue

Recap on AchievementsP.2

Women in Engineering Education P.3

Conferences P.5

Performance & Goals P.6

Member Publications P.7

ToE Most Downloaded P.8

I S S U E

No v 2 0 17

10

Looking Back At Our Achievements

An overview of some of our activities over the last 3.5 years

October 2014—Launch of chapter website and LinkedIn group and first newsletter

February 2015—Launch of rebates to attend AAEE Winter School and IEEE TALE/FIE conferences

June 2015—Launch of the NSW Casual Teacher Forum providing a development opportunity for casuals.

An event that has been held annually with growing participation across all NSW universities

October 2015—An activity to introduce members to mixed reality virtual worlds

June 2016—A Distinguished Lecture from Prof Froyd, Editor of IEEE Transactions on Education

June 2016—Women in Engineering Education Forum

October 2016— Chapter receives 'Chapter Achievement Award' from the Education Society. Award was

received at IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, October 2016, Erie, PA, USA

May 2017—Webinar on publishing in AJET

May 2017—Webinar on membership upgrades

August 2017—Launch of Education Society MOOC: Open Education and OERs Repositories

November 2017—Election of our first female chapter chair

AAEE Winter School Membership Growth

One of the greatest achievements of the committee has been the

doubling of membership. A big thank you goes out to all members for

your support and engagement with the chapter.

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NSW Education Chapter Membership

Women in Engineering Education

Wrapping up the year

IEEE NSW

Education

Chapter

Committee 2017

Chapter Chair

Sasha Nikolic

Vice Chair

Christian Ritz

Past Chair

Jun Shen

Secretary

Montse Ros

Women in Engineering Education

Sudipta Chakraborty

Sessional Teaching

Jacob Donley

General Member

Graeme Gwilliam

We are moving towards the Christmas holidays and the beginning of a fresh year. With the year coming

to an end, it is also the time to publish the final newsletter from the present WiEE group.

Among the activities held in the second half of

this year, two events are worth mentioning in

which WiEE members participated. In the

month of July, WiEE members joined the IEEE

NSW casual teacher forum organized at UTS.

There were presenters from different

Universities such as UTS, MQU, UWS, UNSW

and UOW. This platform was shared by both

experienced tutors as well as new tutors.

Different aspects of teaching were highlighted

in these presentations. New tutors mentioned

their challenges to conduct the tutorials and

the new tools they have used in their classes. Relatively experienced tutors focussed on the delivery of

the curriculum which helped the students to better engage with the unit. After the presentations there

were some fruitful discussions with lots of ideas exchanged.

In the month of August, WiEE committee contributed to organize the Women in Engineering (WiE) track

of ANZSCON 2017 (IEEE Australia New Zealand Student and Young Professional Congress). ANZSCON

2017 was held in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on the 10th and 11th of August 2017 at University

of Technology, Sydney. Five activities were organized over two days. On the first day, there were three

keynote speeches followed by an interactive session and a panel discussion on the second day.

The opening keynote speech titled “IEEE WIE Initiatives for enhanced Visibility” was given by Dr.

Bozenna Pasik-Duncan, Chair of IEEE WIE. Dr. Bozenna encouraged women to join IEEE activities

and to make themselves “visible”. The second keynote titled “Engaging WIE members in IEEE WIE

workshops and Technical societies for fostering careers” was delivered by Dr. Celia Shahnaz, Co.

Chair IEEE WIE Workshops Sub-committee; who encouraged women to get involved with WIE

workshops. The final Keynote speech was by Dr. Janina Mazierska, IEEE Region 10 Director 2007-

2008, titled “Leadership Skills for Life”. In her talk it was emphasized that a leader should be able

to influence others by his or her notable work and not because of the power or position one

holds. On the second day, there were interesting discussions in the interactive forum titled

“Nurturing Industry-Academia-Innovation and Entrepreneurship for women in STEM” and the

panel discussion titled “Empowerment of Women in STEM through supports from Male heads,

Chief executives and mentors”.

In the conclusion, I would like to mention that I will be taking up the challenging role of the

Chapter Chair of NSW IEEE Education Society. I am looking forward to transfer my current

responsibility to the new WiEE chair for another energetic year.

To join the WIEE team and follow events please email sudipta.chakraborty@mq.edu.au.

Article by: SUDIPTA CHAKRABORTY

Recent Activities

NSW Casual Teacher Forum 2017

TSSP:

Engineering lesson plans

can be found at: http://

tryengineering.org/

Computing lesson plans

can be found at: http://

www.trycomputing.org/

Please join the team.

Make a difference today!

In June the chapter held its annual casual teacher forum at UTS with great support from the UTS IEEE

student branch. We had about 20 participants

from most of NSW’s universities. Presentations

included: Student ratings in the laboratory, what

does this tell me about their learning?; Best tools

for teaching; Teaching strategies and difficulties;

The teacher vs tutor gap; and Make power

engineering great again. This was followed by an

open forum where issues and ideas associated

with casual teaching was discussed.

Cancelled Activities

A Women in Engineering Education event was scheduled for late October. However, due to time

commitments this event had to be cancelled. We also had a guest speaker planned for November, but

due to unforeseen circumstances the speaker had to cancel his trip to Australia.

AAEE Winter School

2016 Chapter Achievement Award to be presented to the NSW Chapter in Erie, PA at IEEE FIE

The citation reads: for experiencing an 80% increase in membership across two years

through frequent innovative technical meetings, supporting women in engineering

education and providing development opportunities to teaching assistants.

The presentation of this award is scheduled for our annual conference, Frontiers in

Education, which will be held in Erie, Pennsylvania, USA, October 12-15, 2016. This

award will be presented at an Awards Banquet on Friday, October 14, 2016. More

information about the conference is available http://fie2016.org/. The award includes a

$1,000 stipend to be used for chapter activities

Why Education Research?

Q: Why should you care about education research?

I have heard many conversations about the conflicting nature

between publishing papers in journals and teaching. In the

argument surrounding conflicting time constraints, one area that

many academics forget is educational research. With careful

planning, the time and effort you put into the classroom to provide

that exceptional engineering education experience, can be

transformed into world class research. Alternatively the research of

others can help transform your teaching with less effort, with many

proven ideas ready for you to take advantage of.

Can you help school teachers implement classroom activities?

IEEE - Teacher In-Service Program (TISP) known as TSSP in NSW is a support network for

primary and secondary school teachers. Volunteers work with teachers and attend conferences

to showcase valuable lesson plans that help teach engineering and computing.

Engineering lesson plans can be found at: http://tryengineering.org/

Computing lesson plans can be found at: http://www.trycomputing.org/

If you can help, please email Graeme to join the team and help with future events:

gb.gwilliam@ieee.org

TALE 2017—Our Regional IEEE Conference

IEEE International Conference on

Teaching, Assessment, and

Learning for Engineering (TALE)

is held each year in the Asia-

Pacific region (IEEE Region 10). It

is intended to complement

existing conferences sponsored

by the IEEE Education Society,

most notably Frontiers in

Education in North America (IEEE

Regions 1–7) and EDUCON in

IEEE TALE2017 will be held 12-14 December 2017, The Education

University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong.

Upcoming Conferences

EDUCON2018

17-20 April 2018

Canary Islands, Spain

Link

Frontiers in Education

3-6 October 2018

San Jose, CA

USA Link

AAEE2017

December, 2017

Manly, Australia Link

TALE2017

10-13 December, 2017

Hong Kong Link

ASCILITE 2017

4-6 December 2017

Toowoomba Link

Europe/Middle East/Africa (IEEE

Region 8). The aim of TALE is to

provide an excellent platform for

both academicians and

practitioners to share their

experience and knowledge in

engineering education at all

levels. Both research and

practice-oriented papers are

welcome in order to emphasize

the needs of interdisciplinary

collaboration in engineering and

education .

Paper Submission due 23rd of

July 2017

Organiser:

The Education University of

Hong Kong

Link

Upcoming Education Conferences

Chapter Goals

Members:

At the start of every year we

have a drop in membership

due to the IEEE

membership renewals cut

off date. We started the

new year with 34 members,

currently sit at 39 and hope

to reach a new peak of 40

members by the end of the

year

An update on our progress on achieving our 2017 goals. Your contribution

can help us achieve them.

LinkedIn:

We missed our target of

reaching 60 members last

year. Member activity has

also been limited. At the end

of the year we will consider if

LinkedIn is the best way

forward. Please add articles

of interest.

Activities:

After a busy first half of the

year the second half of the

year has been quiet due to

a number of last minute

cancellations. We are open

to ideas for 2018. Please

share your ideas.

Chapter Goals

2016 Goals (Achievements last year)

Reach 40 members by Dec 2016

2014 - 28 members 2015 - 36 members 2016 - 38 members

Encourage member contributions

At least one distinguished lecture We had a lecture by Jeff Froyd, Editor of IEEE ToE

At least two technical meetings We had 3 technical and 1 general meeting

Fund a rebate to an IEEE Education Society Conference One person sent to IEEE FIE

Fund a rebate to AAEE Winter School on Engineering Education Not taken up

Reach 60 members in our LinkedIn group We reached 57 members

2017 Goals (This year)

Increase chapter members

Reach 40 members by Dec 2017

Grow group membership to LinkedIn group

Reach 65 members by Dec 2017

Encourage member engagement

At least one distinguished lecture

At least two technical meetings

Fund a rebate to an IEEE Education Society Conference

Fund a rebate to AAEE Winter School on Engineering Education

Making the local chapter

work more for you

The committee would really

like to bring value to your

Education Society

membership. To do this we

need your help in

formulating ideas that we

can implement. Therefore,

if you have any ideas please

let us know what they are.

You can provide

anonymous feedback here:

https://

www.surveymonkey.com/r/

EdSocIdeas2016

Member Research– Recent Member Publications

Experiment@ International Conference 2017 ,

D Lowe, Z Liu

Laboratory-based experiments are an important learning tool in many disciplines. These

experiments involve students exploring physical phenomena. In many cases however these

phenomena are not directly visible (e.g. magnetism, heat, etc.) The recent emergence of

augmented reality technologies provides us with a way to change the way in which we perceive

the real world. It can therefore be postulated that augmented reality may be able to be used to

change the way in which students perceive reality whilst undertaking real-world

experimentation, and hence to improve the educational process and outcomes. In this work we

evaluate the potential for utilising Augmented Reality (AR) technology in a laboratory context.

We consider a range of illustrative scenarios for enhancing the laboratory experience, such as:

annotations to the experimental configuration; making visible phenomena that are otherwise

invisible; and changing the actual laboratory configuration. We then use these scenarios to

propose a classification of laboratory augmentation types

Link

IEEE NSW

Education

Chapter

Publications

A full list of education

publications from IEEE

NSW Education

Chapter members is

available on the

chapter website

Please email the chair

with your latest

education publications

to update your

publications on the list

A flipped mode teaching approach for large and advanced electrical

engineering courses

Potential for utilising head-mounted displays (HMDs) for augmenting

laboratories

European Journal of Engineering Education

J Ravishankar, J Epps, E Ambikairajah

A fully flipped mode teaching approach is challenging for students in advanced engineering

courses, because of demanding pre-class preparation load, due to the complex and analytical

nature of the topics. When this is applied to large classes, it brings an additional complexity in

terms of promoting the intended active learning. This paper presents a novel selective flipped

mode teaching approach designed for large and advanced courses that has two aspects: (i) it

provides selective flipping of a few topics, while delivering others in traditional face-to-face

teaching, to provide an effective trade-off between the two approaches according to the

demands of individual topics and (ii) it introduces technology-enabled live in-class quizzes to

obtain instant feedback and facilitate collaborative problem-solving exercises. The proposed

approach was implemented for a large fourth year course in electrical power engineering over

three successive years and the criteria for selecting between the flipped mode teaching and

traditional teaching modes are outlined. Link

IEEE Transactions on Education

Most Downloaded Article September 2017

Mariano Garduño-Aparicio; Juvenal Rodríguez-Reséndiz; Gonzalo Macias-

Bobadilla; Suresh Thenozhi; IEEE Transactions on Education, Currently in

Early Access

This paper presents a robot prototype for an undergraduate laboratory program designed to

fulfill the criteria laid out by ABET. The main objective of the program is for students to learn

some basic concepts of embedded systems and robotics, and apply them in practice. For that

purpose, various practical laboratory exercises were prepared to teach different aspects of

communications, control, mechatronics, and microcontrollers. The practicals are organized

such that the students can systematically solve real-world problems. The most important

feature of the presented program is that, it incorporates interdisciplinary knowledge, and

inculcates technical and professional skills required in pursuing a successful career.

Furthermore, students and instructors can modify the software and hardware units of the robot

prototype as necessary, to explore more ideas and to apply the robot in other mechatronics-

related courses. A digital electronics course taught at the Automation Department at

Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico, is presented as a case study in which

the evaluation process was based on ABET criteria and the corresponding student outcomes. A

student survey elicited students' observations of, and interest in, the learning process. The

positive student feedback and student academic outcomes indicate that the inclusion of

prototype had a significant impact on student academic outcomes

Link

IEEE

Education

Society

Publications

A Multidisciplinary Industrial Robot Approach for Teaching

Mechatronics-Related Courses

About this Newsletter

This newsletter was created by the IEEE NSW Education Chapter Chair:

Sasha Nikolic

November 2017

More Resources

To get access to more resources in regards to engineering education,

and educational research please visit the chapters website.