‘Needless to say we never got such great feedback for chemical product design.’
Dr Ljiljana Fruk, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Cambridge
The Course: Chemical Product Design
A 4th year Engineering course in designing products covering market needs, design, ideas, constraints, manufacture, and ethics.
8 x 2 hour ‘lectures’ face to face plus assessment
The Mission
The key concern was around assessment as too much time was spent marking long assignments, despite efforts to keep submissions succinct. Essays were included and were highly content focussed and ultimately very much within the remit of what AI software can produce. Though this was not mentioned specifically in the request, it was an underlying consideration throughout the design process.
Teaching events were a combination of lecture and discussion activities with mixed responses from students. There was a clear distinction between those who enjoyed the creative activities and those who preferred a more mathematical approach. A secondary request was to make the learning more active and the experience for both students and lecturers more fun.
The Team
The core teaching team comprised Dr Ljiljana Fruk (BioNano Engineering) and Dr Graham Christie (Molecular MicroBiology) with Dr Matthew Cheeks, Senior Director at AstraZeneca.
The Learners
Learners are about to graduate with a degree in engineering and head off to illustrious careers in industry. For some, this will mean commercialising a discovery or invention either within their own businesses or as part of large corporates. For many, it means stepping into a world of consultancy. In both cases, the practical concerns of industry and commercial operation are imminent. This course aims also to provide a bridge between the students entirely academic experience and the world of work as Engineering professionals.
Learners have a keen interest in modelling as this is how they spend much of their time and it can be challenging for many to leave precise calculations behind in favour of back of the napkin workings in the pursuit of creative experimentation. There is also strong resistance against doing any activities outside lecture time as the students are overburdened with independent work from other courses in their final year. Learners also often complain about a lack of feedback at the end of the course.
The Process
First of all we ‘designed’ an ideal graduate. We looked at the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to make them hireable by Matthew at AstraZeneca and came up with a varied list of hard science and engineering expertise combined with creativity and innovative thinking along with professional skills like team working and effective communications.
We then checked our list against what had been covered elsewhere in the degree programme and removed these items and others that were beyond scope. We used the remainder as the basis for writing the course level learning outcomes that would be the guiding light for the rest of the design work. We set out the topics that should be covered and wrote learning outcomes for each and mapped those to the overall outcomes. From here the assessments suggested themselves, which in turn led to learning activities.
The Assessments
There was a strong desire for less wordy assessments for quicker marking. We incorporated peer assessment and feedback as well as automatically marked (assessed) activities with rich feedback. We included a number of group assignments which also reduced the marking burden. Essentially there was an assessed activity every week, which was done in and outside class time.
Activities
The activities included quizzes, scenarios, product briefs, process infographics, a ‘tweet’, a logo (optional), all helping to prepare for a Dragons Den pitch for investment which were recorded as videos (in groups as companies) and shared with the class. In the second stage of the Den, students were the Dragons and effectively did a consultancy exercise by reviewing and scoring the pitches according to course criteria based on the learning outcomes. They were required to give rich feedback, as would be expected of a consultant, and this was carefully scaffolded.
The prize
The 3 companies with the highest scores then had to update their pitches following feedback from peers in preparation for a live presentation to Katja Kostelnik from Cambridge Enterprise in the final session before they received feedback on their pitches and the feedback they gave as well.
Student submissions
The quality of pitches shared was very high, all of which showed deep engagement with the target knowledge and skills of the course. Learners took a very creative approach to this and each ‘company’ had a very distinctive style, as well as an inventive, market needs driven product that they designed themselves. Consultancy feedback from students was similarly high quality with thoughtful insightful commentary being shared that would definitely help companies refine their offer.
AI use in submissions
The more productive, creative items for submission were made on products and processes that the learners had invented themselves so there was little use in asking a language model to come up with a pitch for non-existent things.
Students in one group had designed a machine to dispense personalised cosmetic formulations in-store and used AI to generate an image of the machine. This was a valuable addition to their pitch but as ‘drawing a machine’ was not a learning outcome of the course it made no difference to how the assignment was graded. AI enhanced their pitch, increased their confidence and creativity and didn’t give them an unfair advantage over anyone else.
The Learning Experience
Ljiljana and Graham reported that students had never been so engaged in the course, citing one session where the students carried on with their group discussions after the lecture had ended and the lecturers had left the room!
In final feedback, students said the experience was ‘super interesting,’ ‘engaging’ and ‘exciting’, noting the enthusiasm of the lecturers and enjoyment of the personal nature of the group work and the ability to think more entrepreneurially.
Focussing primarily on the assessment journey afforded a new perspective on assessment and learning activities even though the majority of the content of the course remained unchanged. This transformed the quality of the experience for both learners and educators and sidestepped AI concerns.