1.     Introduction and overview of the SEEDS project

The focus of this workshop is to share the outputs of an Erasmus+ project -SEEDS,   which has taken place over the past three years. The objective of SEEDS was to explore and present best practice methods and tools for digital education for engineers and computer scientists.  A goal of the teaching activities during the SEEDS project was to allow students to gain intercultural, interdisciplinary skills by collaboration with international students, whilst addressing technical challenges posed by industry partners of the Universities.  Two summer schools were held as part of the project.

 

The first was hosted by the Munster Technological University in Ireland, at its Cork campus. The students’ challenge was to provide innovative technical solutions to address the safety and security of users in old Victorian tunnels as part of a new cycling and pedestrian green-way infrastructure in the county of Cork. The industry partner here was the local authority of Cork County and the national agency responsible for the roll out of the sustainable travel infrastructure  -  Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII).

The second summer school was hosted by UPSSITECH School of Engineering in Paul Sabatier University, in Toulouse France. Here the students were posed two challenges with four groups exploring innovative solution of the maintenance and repair of Toulouse metro lines operated by Tisseo. The other students worked with the wheelchair rugby teams of Stade Toulouse.

 

An overview of both summer schools will be shared in this workshop – the design of the school and the student outputs.

 

The motivation for the research project was to explore how modernisation and digitization of education can strengthen connections and collaboration of educators and students across a common educational area. The project has shared, exchanged and experimented with methods and tools for improving digital skills whilst enhancing the interdisciplinary and intercultural experience for tertiary education. This project was conceived during the COVID pandemic when educators were developing and exploring all opportunities for innovative and digital skills in their teaching.  

 

The team believe that collaboration and intercultural experiences of students and educators, based on digital competences and innovative methods for fine-grained internationalisation, are one of the essential components of this common European educational space.  

 

The partners in this research project are as follows, and each will share an element of their contributions in this workshop.

EU Country	University	Contributors
France	Universite Paul Sabatier Toulouse 111, Toulouse (lead partner)	Philippe Joly, Philippe Truillet and Pierre-Henri Cros
Germany	Ostfalia Hochschule Fuer Angewandte Wissenschaften, Wolfenbuttel	Reinhart Gerndt and Véronique Bizien
Portugal	Coimbra University	Paulo Menzes and  Jorge Lobo
Ireland	Munster Technological University	Kieran Ruane and Mary Moloney

 

The disciplines of the team included: civil, electrical, and electronic engineers; and robotic and computer scientists.

 

The needs identified by the Steering Team at the outset of the project were: 

1.        to give an equal access to all the students to high level courses, remote or in-person, while increasing their employability;

2.        to prepare educators and the university community to address the challenge of blended programmes between remote and in-person courses;

3.        to work closely with industrial companies and partner with them for their own advantages and for those of the students, through the posing of real industry challenges.

 

The team believes the SEEDS project and the students’ participation has facilitated these future professionals and citizens to gain intercultural and professional skills with a European dimension. By involving students, educators and administrative staff, digital competencies of all aspects of university education have been enhanced through their participation in this SEEDS project.

 

2.     Workshop Programme

 

This proposed workshop will share identified suitable digital tools and demonstrate how the project team has exchanged and experimented with them during this research project. The project team will discuss how they can be expanded for enhanced online and blended teaching, learning and interdisciplinary collaboration.

 

Participants of the workshop will be surveyed throughout on each of the elements to assess their opinion on the applicability of the different digital tools explored in the session and how they can be enhanced and integrated into a broad range of programmes across engineering and science education. The proposed programme for the workshop is:

 

i)                             Virtual Training Laboratories, Dr Jorge Lobo, Coimbra University

 

The Covid restrictions of 2020 saw pivots of customs and practice in all areas of life and in this presentation we examine the move to online teaching for university engineering departments.  Engineering education typically includes laboratory work and with students confined to their homes due to Covid lockdowns innovative methods for laboratory teaching were required.  In the case study presented here, Dr. Lobo described in detail a methodology for making an electrical engineering laboratory fully virtual.  The methodology has applications in other areas of engineering and science education and provides a framework for providing fully inclusive education.  The methodology was successfully deployed in recent years and the feedback from student participants was positive.

 

ii)                          Virtual Site Visits, Dr Mary Moloney, Department of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering, Munster Technological University

 

The work presented in this element of the workshop will illustrate how the use of immersive 360^o video and photographs, viewed in virtual reality headsets or via 360^o media players, can enhance and broaden student knowledge and experience when undertaking Project Based Learning (PBL) assignments. The workshop will share the workflow to prepare a Virtual Site Visit (VSV) and illustrate the array of mediums available in which the VSV can be shared with students. This session will share a suggested workflow to prepare the recording of the VSV along with the video recording methodology and editing process. A live demonstrate of the equipment used for recording the VSV will be included in the workshop.

 

By using coverage of real buildings, PBL assignments can be set for students which are real and innovative. This pedagogical approach allows educators to use particularly interesting or challenging buildings and case studies, once a VSV has been generated. This is particularly useful: for students who may have accessibility issues due to physical disabilities; the sharing/experiencing of interesting structures from around the world in a much more meaningful way; or for distance/online learning.

 

A prototype VSV was prepared and used to share a public building on which a PBL assignment was based. Feedback was gathered from the student cohort and will be shared with the workshop.

 

Further feedback from the workshop participants will be sought in how this VSV methodology could be expanded further in the education of engineers and scientists.   

 

iii)                       An Engineering Summer School, Kieran Ruane, Department of Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering, Munster Technological University

 

This paper shares the design and delivery of an international summer school by the Department Civil, Structural & Environmental Engineering at MTU. The summer school was an element of the SEEDS Erasmus+ project. The school hosted students from Ostfalia University (Germany), Caoimbra University (Portugal) and Toulouse University (France). In total 24 students participated, with the students divided into project teams with members from each University.

 

The two-week programme was structured for the students to undertake a design challenge and present their suggested solutions at the closing ceremony to their client, Cork County Council. The challenge posed by Cork County Council was to develop solutions to make an abandoned Victorian railway tunnel safe and attractive to all users and easy to maintain and operate. Cork County Council is proposing to reopen a disused tunnel and use it as a greenway for pedestrians and cyclists. The tunnel is currently in a state of disrepair and the Council is now embarking on the design of a programme of works to rehabilitate the tunnel and integrate it into a new greenway network. Tunnels on greenways can be problematic in terms of users' security perceptions and overall tunnel management. Students proposed some very interesting and insightful solutions.

To assist the design teams in addressing the challenge a series of lectures was delivered on the Design Thinking process to carefully guide the students through the design development.  The students were mentored by colleagues from the department of Civil, Structural and Environmental engineering along with visiting lecturers from the three Erasmus + partner universities. There were also several team building exercises, a site visit to the disused Victorian tunnel and a series of technical lectures from subject matter experts.

 

iv)                       A Robotics Summer School, Professor Philippe Joly, Dr Philippe Truillet and Pierre-Henri Cros, University Toulouse III

In this article, we present the objectives targeted by the organization of a summer school on robotics by UPSSITECH, the engineering school of Toulouse 3 University – Paul Sabatier.  This summer school combined Hackathon-type challenges with support courses aiming at assisting students in their work of building a response to the proposed challenges.  These challenges were formulated by stakeholders in society and targeted real problems for which they are looking for solutions.

The first challenge concerned assistance for predictive maintenance of tunnel infrastructure on one of the metro lines in Toulouse.  The subject was proposed by the TISSEO company.  Two site visits were organized during the two weeks to allow students to better understand the complexity and diversity of the aspects requiring vigilance from technicians for maintenance.

The second topic was proposed by the sports club "Stade Toulousain Handisport", and more precisely by the Quadrugby team, eager to improve its performance analysis capabilities of wheelchair athletes, whether in training or sports meetings.  Competition wheelchairs were loaned by the club for the duration of the Summer School - a period during which some of the players were absent to participate in the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games.

The 28 participating students, from 4 different universities in Europe (University of Coimbra, MTU, Ostfalia and UT3) were grouped into 6 international and multidisciplinary teams (mainly Civil Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, IT and Robotics).  They had to organize themselves in order to build innovative proposals responding to these challenges, in the form of models made in a fablab, a technical presentation and a video promoting their results.

v)                           Assessments and Quality Assurance in the Virtual Teaching Space, Prof. Reinhart Gerndt, Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences

In this presentation Prof. Gerndt presents ideas and trials of online assessment techniques and proposes measures for ensuring quality assurance in the virtual examination space.

vi)                       Concluding Remarks and Panel Discussion, Dr Paulo Menezes, Coimbra University, Prof. Philippe Joly, University Toulouse III

We will conclude this workshop with a general assessment of the activities carried out within the framework of this project, identifying the difficulties that led us to reorient some of the initial objectives and highlighting the actions that have produced the most promising results for the future.

We will identify the scope of all content production and propose to the audience to debate on various subjects related to them, such as their dissemination, exploitation or enrichment beyond the framework of the SEEDS program with the panel of speakers and the attendees.