Within the EPC family, our members have continued to face enormous challenges and the EPC offers thoughtful leadership and representation to ensure we can best support our members in meeting these challenges. Alongside events and blogs, members can access the EPC’s online bank of best practice resources such as out toolkits and our data explorer. Click on each of the tabs below to see some of our highlights:
The EPC was delighted to announce the launch of our Engineering Ethics Toolkit in February 2022. This growing resource is being developed by the EPC with the generosity and support of the Royal Academy of Engineering, as part of the profession’s on-going work to embed ethical practice into the culture of engineering. The EPC’s President Prof. Mike Sutcliffe wrote a short blog to welcome you to this ambitious new initiative to ensure engineering education is a force for good, which you can read here.
The first milestone in the development of the ethics toolkit is available on our website, with a range of case studies and supporting articles to help engineering educators integrate ethics content into their teaching.
The launch of our case studies, the importance of these resources and embedding ethics into engineering education was reiterated by Prof. David Bogle just before our toolkit was live at the launch of the “Engineering Ethics: maintaining society’s trust in the engineering profession” report from the joint Engineering Council / RAEng, Engineering Ethics Reference Group. Our case studies come under the Education and Training actions of this report, which aim to support and improve how ethics is understood by those in the engineering profession. You can view pdf versions of our case studies and the engineering ethics report on the RAEng website.
Over summer 2022 our ethics advisory group has been seeking contributors to create new case studies, enhancements and articles for our ethics toolkit. These contributions alongside an updated ethics curriculum map will form the new toolkit resources to be launched at the beginning of 2023.
The EPC’s Research, Innovation and Knowledge Transfer (RIKT) Committee put out a call in July 2021 for members to submit academia-industry partnership case studies. By the end of the call, nearly 50 applications were received and a sub-group of the RIKT Committee shortlisted 25 of these to be presented at an online launch webinar for the Crucible Project on the 16th February 2022. Over 120 attendees joined us for this online event which saw a huge range of case studies outlining innovative and engaging collaborations between academia and industry, as well as a guest lecture by Prof. John Patsavellas (Cranfield University).
Subsequent to this, the Crucible Project Toolkit was launched on the EPC website in April 2022 to showcase the case studies presented at the event but also many more – access to these individual case studies is an exclusive EPC member benefit. The RIKT Committee envisions this toolkit as a living and growing resource to help EPC members to find research funding, place graduates in employment, create work-based learning opportunities and so on. Next steps for the Crucible Project Toolkit include a system to allow members to contribute their own, or further case studies to ensure that this resource continually grows.
As part of the development of EPC Online we have created the Data Explorer feature – this members-only resource presents data visualisations specially designed to help EPC members explore a wealth of engineering sector datasets and to show data customised to the interest of Engineering academics in any discipline. The data is arranged according to population:
- Applications and admissions;
- Student enrolments;
- Student completion and;
- Academic staff
These sections each contain a variety of questions that can be explored through interactive charts and tables. Additionally, members are able to download the dataset can be downloaded to allow sorting and presenting in ways that will be most helpful to them.
