INTRODUCTION

Macquarie University introduced a three year Bachelor of Technology (Optoelectronics) degree as one of a program of BTech degrees in 1990. The first cohort of students completed the degree in 1992. The graduates of this degree were targeted to employment in the emerging photonics industries of Australia. Thus, components of the degree (and its successor phased in from 2007) have to address development of skills and capabilities in several key areas such as: knowledge and understanding of appropriate content; problem solving skills; comfort and confidence with sophisticated photonics and optics related instrumentation; communication skills; time management; and research skills. One key assessment task to develop the latter three skills requires the students to research and write a Technology Profile, on an area of optoelectronic/photonic technology of their choice, most often from a comprehensive list provided. This was one of the assessment tasks in the unit of study “Optoelectronic Systems and Devices II”, a third year, second semester unit. They also gave a seminar to the class and teaching staff, drawn from the content of their Technology Profile. After almost ten years of this offering, teaching staff noted that the engagement by students with this assessment task, was waning. Also, the quality of the technology profiles submitted was perceived as diminishing and there was an increase in use of “cut-and-paste”. These changes were not judged as being correlated with any identifiable change in the ability or background of the student cohort at that time. Instead it was concluded that a process of renewal of the task should be undertaken with the aim of increasing student motivation, increasing student engagement and learning, decreasing plagiarism, increasing the priority student’s gave to completing the task, and increasing the real and perceived benefits by the students. These learning dimensions are summarised in Table 1. To assist the students to develop the necessary research skills they are given an example of an Optoelectronic Technology Profile written by the author, along with a “how to/ where to” find the information that will be needed for different types of technology profile. Examples are reviews of a mature technology, or a state-of-play of an emerging technology. Students are assisted to use their “brief” as a tool to manage the reference set that needs to be assimilated and synthesised to adequately address their chosen topic. They learn about time and project management, as well as the technology, via this task design.

Table 1:

Summary of planned learning outcomes and skill and capability development.

Student motivation is also addressed by “publishing” an annual volume of the technology profiles from the class as a whole and this has been a successful motivator for most students. Students are encouraged to produce an example of their work that they can show to potential employers. This student publishing was one of the features of teaching practice in the department that was selected for inclusion in the resource booklet from the project “learning outcomes and curriculum development in physics” produced as a national resource for tertiary physics teaching and learning in Australia¹. Plagiarism is still an issue for a small number of students and some technology profiles are not “published” for this and other reasons. The importance of the dialogue between the “teacher” and each student as an individual, around the task, emerges as a key driver of deeper learning. Motivating students to complete the planning stages of the task in good time, so they may avoid making poor decisions on topic, and reference resource selection, with inadequate time to complete the task to the best of their abilities, remains a challenge. Student engagement, and therefore benefits, remains variable across the student population. A major benefit of the explicit and detailed nature of the task design is that it facilitates the teacher to have an evidence based discussion with individual students on how they could readily improve by planning and increased engagement.

THE OPTOELECTRONIC TECHNOLOGY PROFILE TASK

The description of the Technology Profile (TP) task that is distributed to students is given in Appendix A. The task is divided into three main components – (i) the development of a “brief”, and the selection and evaluation of an appropriate set of reference materials; (ii) the completion of the technology profile, informed by the discussion of, and appropriate modification of (i); and (iii) producing a twenty minute presentation from the technology profile. A range of educational resources are available to support student learning in the various parts of the task and these are referenced below. Advice on development of the “brief” and accessing reference resources is also illustrated to the students in the context of an example TP distributed to students. This advice is reproduced in Appendix B. A PERT diagram of the skills and capabilities to be developed, and the elements of the task that support them, is shown in Fig. 2. To support the prime focus on developing research skills, this figure should also be interpreted to students to note the link between good time management and good communication skills as necessary partners to good research skills. It is possible to present all these skills as research skills.

Fig. 1

Optoelectronics technology profile volumes as distributed to each student in the class. Profiles are copyright of the individual students and permission must be sought from the student for profiles to be distributed outside the class.

Fig. 2

PERT diagram of the components of the task, the skills to be educated and developed, and the links and relationships between them. Sub-tasks and the sub-skills appear chronologically down the time management and communication columns of the diagram and correlate across the diagram.

The students completing this task have had extensive experience with writing laboratory reports on experiments they have completed – for all of three hour, six hour, and nine hour experiments across optoelectronics, optics, and physics. Their laboratory report writing skills are well developed and the consensus guideline used by all students in the department is informed by research into processes for improving student writing². They have also completed assessment tasks involving familiarisation with optoelectronic device and system specification sheets and application notes. In this task they are building on this experience and capability to write the technology profile. Accessing standard educational support materials on evaluation of reference resources^3-8 and report writing^8-11 does facilitate completing the task. However, it is also important to inform the students of the need to include reference resources such as product information and patents that are not highlighted in many of the standard guidelines for “How to do library-based research”.

It is the discussion of the task that occurs, between teacher and students, that is the vehicle by which students learn a number of important points:

They are encouraged to assign a specific time allocation to completing the technology profile – say 25 hours. They then learn there is limited benefit in spending a large amount of the available time accessing more reference material than they can subsequently assimilate, compare and contrast. Student awareness of how the quantity of material that needs to be accessed and assimilated scales with the breadth of the technology area to be addressed, is raised. If the topic is to be a review of a broad technology area the students learn it will be very difficult to produce a high quality technology profile that is an excellent synthesis of the field without high quality review resources to use as references. The students have their awareness raised of the causal links between the scale of the task, an appropriate set of high quality reference materials that will be needed to complete the task to an excellent standard, and the time it will take to follow this through the various research stages to completion. The students are empowered to plan for an excellent technology profile through their control of the brief. They can scale the task to achieve an excellent technology profile in the time they assign. The task supports the student to gain self knowledge of their own capability, and, work rate and ethic. The lecturer can also provide feedback to the student on these issues as part of the discussion.

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSIONS

The technology profile learning task has been designed to address specific learning dimensions as listed in Table 1. Evaluation of the success of the TP in achieving the planned improvements is based on student feedback and the reflections of the teacher as ‘practitioner’. They are not research based. The small student numbers in the class prevent a statistically significant result of a controlled study from being achieved in the specific case described. However, the purposeful engagement by students in the discussion of their technology profile brief and the selection and evaluation of appropriate reference materials to use, and their subsequent modified briefs and reference sets, have been clear indicators of improved learning outcomes. Given the clear learning advantages identified it would be difficult to justify carrying out a controlled study, where similar GPA distribution groups are compared, one group denied the discussion step in the process in order to measure quantitatively the difference it makes in final assessment. The learning opportunity would be significantly reduced for the control group. The research skills of the teacher-as-guide are also important for the successful implementation of such learning tasks. The teaching staff are required to have active and current high level research skills. The planned inclusion of such learning tasks in the curriculum is one argument for the need to maintain highly skilled teaching-and-research staff in university departments. At a time when research skills are being identified as needing to be included explicitly in undergraduate curricula, at an increased proportion, any trend towards increased specialisation and separation of research and teaching in staff demographics will reduce the positive learning outcomes that can be expected in developing research skills in the graduates.