From Transfer to Transformation: towards a Framework for Successful Dissemination of Engineering Education

All projects which aim to discover, devise or share “best practices” in teaching and learning are faced with a common problem: how to disseminate their results to the point where others can adopt them. Increasingly, this dissemination requirement is a condition of funding, as funding bodies try to maximise the impact of their initiatives in terms of widespread dissemination and replication of “best practice” across the constituency. Effective dissemination is, however, not an easy goal to achieve. Simply making material available is not dissemination, and telling someone how you think they should change their teaching is not transfer of practice. Investigators are starting to become interested in developing innovative approaches and solutions to this problem[2]. This paper will detail a theoretical and conceptual dissemination framework devised for teaching and learning initiatives, and illustrate its use with practical examples of its implementation in project EPCoS. Project EPCoS was funded from 1996-1999 by the UK Fund for Development in Teaching and Learning to “identify, make explicit and systematize existing best practices in Computer Science student project methods and techniques; to realise techniques for transferring project work practices between institutions; and to execute and evaluate such transfers.” The paper will concentrate on three areas in which the EPCoS framework is distinctive: