Using Systems Thinking To Design Education To Make A Difference – A Progress Report

The Birmingham Centre for Rail Research and Education (BCRRE) delivers research and education to benefit the international rail industry, including an MSc programme which is designed to equip students with the skills needed to lead multidisciplinary engineering projects. The authors are trying to apply some of the systems thinking taught in the programme to the programme itself. It is established practice to maintain learning outcomes for an educational programme and we do that, but we describe how we are trying to improve the information available to us about what the industry wants and the varying needs of our student population. Our information-gathering processes are not just passive feedback loops but are actively focussed on areas of interest. We are also using the V diagram (a systems engineering concept) as a framework for maintaining line of sight to the full set of feedback information in order to assemble a richer picture to support more balanced decision-making. We describe how our approach is already producing richer input which we are using to improve our programme and why we are encouraged that our approach can make a positive difference to achieve a better educational experience in engineering disciplines.