Lecturer: Timothy Drysdale
Fields: Artificial intelligence, education, practical work
Content
This evening talk will reflect on the challenge facing educators, particularly younger educators with many years of teaching ahead of them. The joint pressure of readily-available artificial intelligence affecting the validity of traditional processes, and massification of education reducing the resources available per student, pose a difficult pinch point that is generating demand for authentic, interactive activities but placing a lot of pressure on the available time and space for students to experiment with real equipment in a traditional manner. I\’ll introduce a solution in the form of laboratories in a box, which we have been doing doing at the University of Edinburgh for a number of years, and describe the elements that make these successful for us, how you can adopt a similar approach, the pitfalls to avoid and some fruitful future directions for our communities of educators to explore, in particular in expanding what we do with the data streams to support better learning and in taking our concept of experiments beyond what we are used to doing in traditional laboratories.
Literature
- Reid, D., & Drysdale, T. (2024). Student-facing learning analytics dashboard for remote lab practical work. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 17, 1037-1050. https://doi.org/10.1109/TLT.2024.3354128
- D.Reid, J. Burridge, D. Lowe, T. Drysdale “Open-source remote laboratory experiments for controls engineering education,” International Journal of Mechanical Engineering Education. February 2022. doi:10.1177/03064190221081451
- T. D. Drysdale, S. Kelley, A.-M. Scott, V. Dishon, A. Weightman, R. J. Lewis & S. Watts “Opinion piece: non-traditional practical work for traditional campuses,” Higher Education Pedagogies, 5:1, 210-222, 2020, DOI: 10.1080/23752696.2020.1816845
- G. L. Knight & T. D. Drysdale The future of higher education (HE) hangs on innovating our assessment – but are we ready, willing and able?, Higher Education Pedagogies, 5:1, 57-60, 2020, DOI: 10.1080/23752696.2020.1771610
Lecturer
Prof Timothy Drysdale is the Chair of Technology Enhanced Science Education and Director of Strategic Digital Education in the School of Engineering. His main research activity is in Engineering Education, where he leads the Remote Laboratories group. He and his team have developed an entirely new infrastructure and approach for operating online remote laboratories on traditional campuses (practable.io), winning international awards from the Global Online Laboratories Consortium (Remote Experiment Award 2024) and the Association for Learning Technology / Jisc Award for Digital Transformation in 2023. His prior research activities were in the area of terahertz component design and testing, microwave antennas, and optical plasmonics. He has a long-standing involvement with public outreach in science and engineering, including the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, Science Day at Buckingham Palace, and giving the Isambard Kingdom Brunel Award Lecture at the British Science Festival.
Affiliation: University of Edinburgh
Homepage: https://eng.ed.ac.uk/about/people/professor-timothy-drysdale