Professional Aspects of Engineering

Learning Outcomes

Subject Specific Intellectual and Research Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Awareness of relevant regulatory requirements governing engineering activities in the context of the particular specialisation
• Ability to apply engineering techniques, taking account of a range of commercial and industrial constraints
• Awareness that engineering activities should promote sustainable development and ability to apply quantitative techniques where appropriate

Transferable and Generic Skills

Having successfully completed this module you will be able to:

• Awareness that engineers need to take account of the commercial and social contexts in which they operate
• Ability to design experiments so as to have sufficient statistical power
• Ability to critically summarise technical articles and presentations in your discipline.
• Ability to display and analyse experimental results statistically.
• An ability to evaluate commercial risk
• Awareness of the need for a high level of professional and ethical conduct in engineering
• Understanding of different roles within an engineering team and the ability to exercise initiative and personal responsibility, which may be as a team member or leader

Knowledge and Understanding

Having successfully completed this module, you will be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:

• Knowledge and understanding of management techniques and practices, and business techniques, including project and change management, that may be used to achieve engineering objectives, their limitations, and how they may be applied appropriately

Ethics, sustainability and management

• Business and management techniques, project, people and change management, budgeting and finances.
• Risk evaluation and management
• Ethical engineering (honesty, integrity, respect for: law, life and the environment)
• Sustainability - environmental impacts and the associated legal frameworks, engineering design for sustainability within the prevailing economic and social context.
• Design of new products
• Industrial case studies

Statistics

• Experimental design
• Descriptive and inferential statistics
• Hypothesis testing
• Effect sizes and statistical power

Comprehension

• Structure and layout of technical reports
• Critical review of technical article and presentation
• Presentation of technical results (poster and oral)
• Literature search

Measurement Methods

• Standard instrumentation and techniques for sound and vibration measurements

Teaching and learning methods

This is a two-semester course, with one double lecture per week for both semesters. Some of these will be held in CLS workstation rooms to facilitate computer tutorial sessions, others will take the form of group workshop.

Ethics and Business Practice: This will be taught through lectures, augmented with discussions. External speakers will illustrate issues using real world experience.

Comprehension: This will be taught in a collaborative group setting. Students will be asked to attend seminars in the ISVR Engineering Research Seminar series and these will subsequently be discussed in class. Similarly a mixture of classic and recent research articles in sound and vibration journals will be read and discussed in class with students providing feedback to each other on the effectiveness of their summaries. Students will also make peer-assessments of their fellow students’ summaries.

Measurement: This will be taught in two practical formative lab classes, one on sound and vibration measurement and one on computational software. Preparatory study material will be provided for both.

Statistics: A series of interactive lectures and computer-based exercises with online self-paced quizzes and tests

Independent study as required to study the online material, to prepare for both labs and write up the second one and to complete the rest of the coursework.

Resources & Reading list

General Resources

Lynda.com.

Internet Resources

The Study Skills Toolkit.

Summative

This is how we’ll formally assess what you have learned in this module.

Referral

This is how we’ll assess you if you don’t meet the criteria to pass this module.

Repeat

An internal repeat is where you take all of your modules again, including any you passed. An external repeat is where you only re-take the modules you failed.

Repeat Information

Repeat type: Internal & External