Conference Agenda

Engineering problems are becoming increasingly complex, ill-defined, and socially relevant, and thus require us to combine insights and methods from different disciplinary fields, and to seek input from non-engineers, including communities and public organisations. If graduates are to be successful in working towards such problems, they need to develop meta-disciplinary skills, attitudes and understanding, and learn how to talk critically across disciplinary perspectives. They will need to engage in inclusive and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as balance, synthesise and integrate different forms and types of knowing. Teaching the required competencies explicitly is essential because students are unlikely to have learnt them previously, primarily because of the focus on disciplinary teaching within most education systems. Supporting the evolution of engineering practice and emergence of transdisciplinary engineering therefore necessitates a change in teaching and learning methods. One approach to this has been the emergence of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary programmes primarily at postgraduate, but increasingly at an undergraduate level. Such degree schemes are relatively understudied due to their recent emergence. This paper reports the findings from the first part of a longitudinal study into the lived experiences of students studying on a transdisciplinary undergraduate programme and focuses on expectations and motivations of incoming students. Data was obtained from semi-structured interviews with first year students. A summary of the perceived benefits of studying such courses, as well as the associated challenges, is provided. The paper ends with recommendations in terms of fostering transdisciplinary approaches to education.

Active learning has been widely promoted in recent decades in higher education in various disciplines, including applied science fields such as engineering. Greater student engagement is considered by instructors to result in improved student learning. Instructors have introduced various activities to their classes to reduce or replace long lecture hours in an attempt to promote active learning. This requires students to engage deeper with content, both theoretical and practical. However, student engagement amounts to more than just physical activity, even though many instructors may be inclined to think otherwise. Physical activity, as indicated by student behavior, does not necessarily mean that knowledge construction has occurred. This results in less than optimum achievement of desirable learning outcomes and raises questions about the need to consider other engagement dimensions, including emotional, cognitive, and agentic, given that all of these connect with, and influence how humans learn and how the brain functions. Multidimensional engagement is crucial in stimulating and sustaining student engagement for effective learning. Through the lens of Transdisciplinarity, this paper relates multidimensional engagement to effective knowledge construction. It explains the connection that can be made between multidimensional engagement and experiential learning theory. It reports on how this has been applied in the teaching of engineering. The paper offers suggestions for promoting and maintaining multidimensional engagement, which would benefit the successful implementation of easy-to-implement and complex active learning methods and strategies in engineering education and beyond.

As a rapidly rising trend, digital learning redefines educational boundaries with its accessibility and adaptability. However, this transformation reduced availability of non-verbal cues like facial expressions and body language. While platforms like Teams allow for the possibility of viewing student expressions when cameras are on, this is often not the case. The limited visual interaction hinders teachers' ability to gauge student engagement and detect mind wandering of students —a significant barrier to effective learning. Current research on mind wandering focuses on attention control and visual processing, but it fails to capture the dynamic nature of mind wandering in digital contexts and the potential of eye movement correlations for real-time interventions. This study addresses this challenge by examining the temporal patterns and dynamics of eye movement features over 26 lessons in a controlled online setting. Our findings reveal a periodic attention drift every 15 minutes, yet the focus notably intensifies during the final 15 minutes of class. Through significance and correlation matrix analyses, we identify three critical gaze metrics from 34 indicators—fixation dispersion, fixation quality, and blink frequency—as precise markers for distinguishing between focused and wandering minds. This research contributes to transdisciplinary engineering by integrating insights from educational technology and cognitive psychology to reveal the underlying attention mechanism behind mind wandering through a reduced set of reliable gaze metrics. It also provides a scientific basis for course designers to enhance learning engagement, such as timely interactive prompts or attention-capturing cues, fostering a healthier and sustainable digital learning environment.

Assessments frame how students learn and what they achieve, so it is therefore essential that learners are given an equal opportunity to demonstrate their learning and understanding. Inclusive coursework assessment is often overlooked within universities but by offering a range of assessment approaches for students to demonstrate their learning, all learners can be given an equitable chance of success. Choice in how students evidence their knowledge and understanding can create a more inclusive, caring and motivational learning environment. Embracing educational equality and equity and the promotion of the pedagogy of care around inclusivity is key. Fundamentally, this is not about enabling outliers to join in but in providing a choice of assessment formats for every student. This review recounts the challenges faced by staff and students on developing inter and trans-disciplinary design coursework and creating inclusive assessments. Reflections on this approach to providing a range of authentic, relevant and valuable assessments include how to develop student assessment literacy to make informed choices, mapping of learning outcomes across different assessment formats, managing student expectations and implementing change without causing undue stress and anxiety – for both staff and students. This approach has been warmly praised by students across whole cohorts and not specifically by those who were expected to benefit the most. Interestingly, an inclusive mindset contributed positively to the engagement and experience of all students.