An evaluation of the impact of small-scale funding on the professional practices of engineering academics

Abstract

This paper suggests that small-scale funding aimed at improving learning and teaching is more likely to succeed when ‘top-down’ institutional support coincides with ‘bottom-up’ enthusiasm from funded academics. It discusses the impact of the Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre’s Mini-Project scheme and the influence of institutional culture and strategies, reward and recognition for teaching, departmental approaches to engineering education and pressures on staff time. The paper demonstrates that framed within this context, it is the enthusiasm of the individual that is the key to successful innovation and long-term change. Schemes that direct small-scale funding to individual academics (and not their institutions), are now widely used in the UK to encourage innovation and development in learning and teaching. One such example is the Engineering Subject Centre’s ‘MiniProject’ fund, the aim of which is to enable academics to develop and share good practice in engineering education. This paper presents the outcomes of evaluative research, which collected and analysed evidence of the ability of such funding to promote innovative practices, and the impacts it had on the recipients. The research was conducted by means of an email questionnaire survey of those academics that have received funding from the Engineering Subject Centre over the past five years, followed by one-to-one interviews. The results provide qualitative evidence of the capacity of the scheme to deliver outcomes that enhance the teaching practices of the funded individuals and provide lessons of interest to engineering academics in other institutions – and even to practitioners in other disciplines.