Studio, a breeding ground for curiosity and wonder, has become more of a confined space for innovation lately. Infrastructure shortage also has triggered a somewhat impersonal attitude to studio learning. Can Design-Activism mitigate such stresses on the studio by becoming an alternative mode of driving studio processes? Reflectively, this study…

CSU Engineering is the new civil engineering school at Charles Sturt University in Australia. Established at an institution that has not previously offered Engineering, CSU Engineering has taken the opportunity to design and implement a radically different model for its degree, drawing upon the frontier trends and themes in engineering education…

This paper reports on the use of role-play as a scenario-based learning approach in the teaching of counselling skills, client assessment and diagnostic interviewing within psychological training. While role-play is not a new technique in teaching such skills, its use is generally reserved for the training of higher level students. This paper…

Context based learning (CBL) is a powerful tool that utilises areas of student interest framed in meaningful contexts to foster development of new skills and understanding. For middle school students, engineering activities that relate to real-world problems provide suitable CBL contexts for acquiring conceptual scientific and mathematical…

Professional accrediting bodies and accounting education reviews have long expressed concerns about student capabilities and learning outcomes, including the ability to apply knowledge and make reasoned judgements. In response, we report on a new design that uses a web of threshold concepts to guide curriculum development. With an associated focus…

Legal reasoning is a type of problem solving, and is situated within thinking skills, one of the six threshold learning outcomes established under the auspices of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council's Bachelor of Laws Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Statement. The threshold learning outcomes define what law graduates are…

The article describes the teaching and learning framework that underpins a Kinship Online Module aimed at delivering online cross-cultural training at the university level. It is based on an existing workshop designed and presented to non-Aboriginal staff and students by Lynette Riley, a Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi woman from Dubbo and Moree. In doing…

Problem-based learning (PBL) has been used to scaffold and support student learning in many Australian medical programs, with the role of the facilitator in the process considered crucial to the overall educational experience of students. With the increasing size of student cohorts and in an environment of financial constraint, it is important to…

In this article, the authors present an approach to developing open-ended problems through capturing contextualised mathematics in photographs. They draw upon their research with the Problem Posing Research Project, a collaborative venture between an Australian and a Canadian university to broaden pre-service teachers pedagogical practices in the…

Recently, many educational institutions across the globe have implemented engineering leadership programmes either as a part of a formal engineering curriculum or where leadership development is embedded into separate in-house programmes. This shows the clear intent of these educational institutions to prepare their engineering students for…

This paper describes a tutorial programme developed at the University of Western Australia (UWA) to enhance medical students' learning processes within problem-based learning contexts. The programme encourages students to use more effective learning approaches by scaffolding the development of effective problem-solving strategies, and by reducing…

In applied mathematics particularly, one is interested in modeling real life situations; that is why, one tries to express some actual phenomenon mathematically, and then uses mathematics to determine future outcomes. It may be that one actually wishes to change the future outcome. Mathematics will not do this, but at least it tells one what to…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of a suite of strategies based on the premise that placing students at the centre of the learning process ultimately improves skills, knowledge and understanding. To date, however, there remain relatively few reports on the application of PBL within geography curricula. This paper traces the evolution of a PBL…

At the beginning of my academic journey I held the belief that I would learn to teach simply by teaching. To my dismay, I had underestimated the complicated nature of teaching in higher education and gave little consideration to the ways students learn. Feeling overwhelmed by my situation, I began questioning my teaching practices and student…

Literature on engineering education stresses the need for graduates to have skills such as working globally in a multicultural environment; working in interdisciplinary teams; sharing of tasks on a global, around the clock basis; working with digital communication tools and in a virtual environment. In addition, accreditation criteria include…