Mark Derbyshire, Learning Designer/Educational Technologist from RMIT University (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) was a speaker at PebbleBash 2024 and presented ‘Virtual EnGenius – managing an online industry engagement event with Engineering capstone students.’ Click here to watch the video with the full transcript or if you’re having trouble viewing the video above.
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Hello everyone. Thanks for having me.
I’m Mark. I’m from RMIT University. RMIT stands for Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
RMIT stands on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nations, and I’d like to respectfully acknowledge elders past present and future.
Okay. So, virtually EnGenius.
This is going to be a bit of a little bit of a technical dive into the into the capabilities of PebblePad.
But it will hopefully will show how our students have been able to engage with industry in some engineering projects.
So virtual EnGenius.
This is the online version of the showcase of RMIT engineering school undergraduate students final year capstone projects.
And this gives the students the opportunity to demonstrate their ideas, develop work ready skills and receive feedback from industry.
Now, the event has traditionally been run face to face. The School of Engineering hired out the Melbourne exhibition centre and they had a day event for the day with students set up in booths presenting their final year engineering projects.
With the COVID issue that we had that we heard about this morning, that event was cancelled for for a couple of years running.
But the engineering school still wanted to run an industry event, and we were looking for solutions to put that event online.
In 2020, the event was trialled with a mixture of Flip Grid and Google Docs.
It didn’t really work so well.
It wasn’t a secure platform.
There were privacy issues with that as well.
So for 2021 the idea was revised.
And at that time we were running a pilot of PebblePad at RMIT.
So we decided to trial that as part of the solution.
And as we all know PebblePad can do pretty much anything. So it was really a good platform.
So as stakeholders we had an events team who would normally run the face to face event.
In this instance they were the conduit between the RMIT academic team and the the industry judges who we would bring on board to to assess the student projects.
We had academic supervisors involved.
I have to recognise Professor Majid Nazim who was the coordinator of this event and he he managed the students and all the timings of everything that we were going to see further on. We had industry of judges, the school of engineering as a whole, and of course the students were major stakeholders in the event.
And a point to make is that, we’ve continued that event in post COVID times. So we found PebblePad is a really good platform, for students to present their engineering projects.
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