Welcome to the penultimate episode of Season 2 of the SEFI podcast! In this episode we focus on the development of communication skills, primarily one that you, as the audience of this podcast, will be familiar with - active listening.
We talk to Dr. Gillian Saunders-Smits, an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in the Cognitive Robotics department at Delft University of Technology, an investigator on the European PREFER project who has made use of her experience of industry to work towards reducing the gap between engineering graduate skills and industry needs.
Show notes: https://www.sefi.be/2023/07/18/podcast-season-2-episode-5-european-engineering-educators-is-online/
Join Dr. Natalie Wint (University College London) and Dr. Neil Cooke (University of Birmingham) to learn about how we can help students develop their listening skills
Timestamps
0.00 Welcome and introduction to episode
0.30 Podcast Intro
0.45 Experiences of teaching communication from Natalie and Neil
1.48 Gillian’s Background
3.56 Delft University of Technology and inclusion within Ruth Graham report
6.10 What are transversal competencies?
8.32 Sub skills involved in communication
12.40 Reasons for the skills gap between education and industry
14.18 Levels of mastery
20.32 Comparing which skills are most valued by industry, academics and students
24.52 Design of activities to help students to develop transversal skills; communication games
27.46 Embedding communication activities within existing engineering modules
29.15 Features of effective and ineffective communication
30.45 Evaluating the effectiveness of the intervention
31.41 Aligning activities with learning outcomes, assessment and programme
32.42 Barriers to implementing interventions
33.51 Final advice from Gillian
35.00 Key takeaways from Natalie and Neil.
Resources:
For more detail on some of the findings discussed in this episode you can read Gillian’s publication “Using an industry instrument to trigger the improvement of the transversal competency learning outcomes of engineering graduates”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03043797.2021.1909539
To access the transversal competency tool that was developed, visit https://zenodo.org/record/4675078
To access the resources needed to make use of this listening activity in your own context, visit https://ocw.tudelft.nl/transversal-skills/communicating-is-more-than-just-talking-chinese-whispers-with-a-twist/
Further papers about the intervention
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Written and produced by Neil Cooke and Natalie Wint.
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