Keynote Speakers

Professor Andrew Garrard

Professor of Engineering Education & Head of Multidisciplinary Engineering Education

https://sheffield.ac.uk/engineering/diamond-engineering/our-staff/andrew-garrard

Experiments under the microscope: Why do we teach lab classes and do they have a place in a world with AI?

If you were to ask engineering academics whether they thought it was important to include lab classes in a degree programme, there would likely be overwhelming agreement that it was. If you were to dig a little deeper and ask why they thought labs were so important, you would receive a multitude of different justifications. In this talk, we explore the history of practical engineering education, the seminal publications on the subject, and the predominantly cited expected learning outcomes from labs. The Covid-19 pandemic provided the ultimate empirical test of the justification for the continued delivery of the contemporary engineering lab class by removing learners' access to physical experimental equipment. Despite the ubiquity of the uninvited disruption and the realisation of the efficiency gains achievable with remote learning, as Covid restrictions were lifted, the business of teaching engineering labs (mostly) reverted to the same traditional formats that have been employed for decades. Is this due to academics’ clichéd resistance to change or a case of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? This question can be answered by considering the universally agreed importance of lab classes in an engineering curriculum and what students gain from the experiences of working together, investigating the phenomena of the natural world. This also provides a model to predict the relevance of the practical lab class in a world where AI will be increasingly dominant in higher education, where HE is under increasingly constrained funding, and where big data reduces the need for engineers to understand the nature of complex systems.

Biography

Andrew Garrard is a Professor of Engineering Education. He cut his teeth in teaching as a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University in 2009 before taking up a role at the University of Sheffield to help deliver the ambitious new teaching-focused engineering building, the Diamond. The building houses multidisciplinary teaching labs, and Andrew is the head of a group of 50 staff who work in those labs and are focused entirely on practical education. Andrew has been called upon for his expertise in practical engineering teaching at scale and started the Practical Engineering Education Conference in 2021. 

If you want more bio info it is here: https://sheffield.ac.uk/engineering/diamond-engineering/our-staff/andrew-garrard

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