Abstract:

The landscape of postgraduate education is changing: a significant trend is towards an increasing diversity of educational models and professional higher degrees for specialized fields. Professional postgraduate education is becoming less geared towards preparing candidates for a life in academia, and instead gearing towards expert skills training in support of positions in industry and at universities. This is especially pronounced in engineering disciplines where increasingly more complex products are drawing on greater depths of knowledge and specialized knowledge from multiple fields. This connects strongly with the broader notion of Industry 4.0 – where technology and society are being brought together to achieve more powerful and desirable products, but products with inner workings that are more complex than before. These changes are having a profound impact on what industry would like universities to provide. One such change is the increased demand for taught doctoral and masters programmes and specialized postgraduate courses. This paper investigates one such course, namely a Software Defined Radio (SDR) Master’s level course. The teaching support had to be drawn from an existing pool of academics, none of whom were specialists in this field. The paper focuses on the kind of educator, a ‘hybrid academic’, assembled from available academic staff and bolstered by research, that succeeded in delivering this course. The conceptual framework for this paper uses Activity Theory to reason about the learning and interactions during the course, and the building and sharing of technical knowledge related to using tools and artefacts. Data were obtained from meetings with students and lecturers, logs, project reports, and course evaluations. The findings show how the course, which was initially academically oriented, metamorphosed into a tool-dominant peer-learning structure, supported by sharing of technical tool-based knowledge. This paper explains the SDR Masters course in terms of conflicts and innovations in its activity system following its evolution over multiple years, and its continually hybridizing genre ecology of how it progressively transformed from an initial ‘traditional’ academic structure into the more entangled arrangement of its most recent version offered this year. This latest offering of course was further complicated by COVID-19, in which it had to be changed to a fully distance-mode course in a short time. It is hoped these insights from this paper will benefit other educators involved in teaching similar specialized professional postgraduate taught programmes.

Keywords:

Professional postgraduate education, taught masters, engineering education, software defined radio.