Exploring Student Co-Design of Final Year Major Project Modules

Final Year Major Project Modules (MPMs) are key components of engineering degree programmes, giving students the opportunity to develop a wide range of competencies including: technical, interpersonal, organisational, planning, analytical and risk assessment skills, alongside interprofessional competence and ethical sensitivity (Picard et al., 2022). Although projects provide a multitude of benefits for students, they can prove challenging from an institutional point of view, and many administrative challenges are associated with facilitating projects. These include pairing project fields and supervisors with students, and ensuring that project scopes and student workloads are fair and equal across cohorts. Assessing projects can also be complex, as it involves ensuring students are credited for their efforts while maintaining assessment integrity and a consistent approach to appraisal. Optionality, in some form, often features during the MPM process. Within the School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the authors' institution, students are presented with a list of projects, designed and outlined by academics within the school. Students rank several projects in order of preference and are assigned projects via an algorithm. Students within the school are also offered the opportunity to self-propose a project, or participate in an industrially backed project. This option has not had a high uptake from students, and the authors' are keen to explore why this is the case. This workshop aims to host an interactive and informative discussion focussing on MPMs, how implementing optionality and co-design could benefit staff and students within these modules, and discussing solutions to the difficulties this could present.