Abstract:

In the context of universities as institutions of social reproduction an inherent social capital had developed that determines hierarchy of universities. Such hierarchies produce perceptions of degree currencies and play direct influence in attracting and retaining high quality of students into undergraduate courses. Victoria University (VU), at the lower hierarchical end of Australian universities, as a means of differentiation introduced Problem Based Learning (PBL) pedagogies in 2006. Engineering Schools at VU were first to embrace PBL. It was hoped that such transformation in teaching and learning would attract higher quality entrants, more females and reduce attrition rates in engineering at VU. Ten years later this pedagogical project had all but disappeared. Despite large investment in teaching spaces and material there was little improvement on counts of attracting greater proportion of females, lowering attrition rates, and being a destination of high academic achievers from secondary colleges. The study, in this paper, taken over seven years suggests that high proportion of incoming students had little idea of PBL pedagogy. Many students arriving from schools where passive educational delivery was the norm were uncomfortable with the active and constructivist PBL methodologies. Though one of the conclusions of this paper that PBL ought to have been retained for much longer to establish a highly recognizable educational paradigm in the community, there is another important factor. Many lower ranking universities within the Australian educational environment managed to develop courses which were competitive with same courses at the higher ranking universities in terms of attracting high calibre students. This was done by developing attractive and socially relevant curricula. It is the contention of this paper is that success relies not as much of how the course is taught but rather than the curriculum epistemology.

Keywords:

Engineering pedagogy, engineering attractiveness, problem-based learning.