The head of a new teaching-focused engineering college spun out of an alliance of three major global universities has said that lectures will be ¡°banned¡± at the new institution.

Judy Raper, former deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Wollongong, also said that academics will be given the same contracts as industry experts who work with students at TEDI-London, which hopes to become a university in just a few years.

The UK-based institution is being set up by the PLuS Alliance, a collaboration between King¡¯s College London, UNSW?Sydney and Arizona State University and aims to ¡°develop globally focused and socially aware engineers¡±.

One of its targets is to have gender balance among its cohort of students, given that engineering is a subject that historically has a poor record for the proportion of women studying it. The plan is to have a student body that is half domestic students, and half international learners. But there is also an aim to recruit students from other under-represented backgrounds too.

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Professor Raper, who was awarded the Ada Lovelace Medal in 2018 for the most outstanding female engineer in Australia, told?Times Higher Education¡¯s Young Universities Summit, hosted by the University of Surrey, that the plan was to broaden the ¡°diversity of engineers in the UK in particular but potentially around the world¡±.

¡°The disruption and pedagogy that is very different is a fully flexible design engineering programme that depends on the students¡¯ ability to take responsibility for their own learning rather than their ability in maths and physics and STEM subjects,¡± she said.

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Instead of learning theory in traditional lectures, students will take computer-based modules on campus, although traditional exams will still be used to assess their knowledge. The main focus of coursework, meanwhile, will be around practical design tasks co-organised with industry partners. Students ¡°with the ability¡± will have the option of completing accelerated degrees in two years.

¡°Lectures will be banned. There will be tutorials and facilitated learning and students learning from each other and the academics,¡± Professor Raper said.

TEDI-London (The Engineering and Design Institute-London), whose campus will be part of a major regeneration of docklands at Canada Water in the city¡¯s southeast, is also seeking to hire professional engineers to teach the students on the same basis as academics.

¡°We are not going to have a distinction between academic and professional staff for a start. Everybody will have an individual contract. We will have academics as mentors and coaches alongside industry people, industry engineers and others,¡± Professor Raper said.

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She?told the conference that the venture hoped to become a university in just a matter of years after gaining its own degree-awarding powers. ?

And she expressed a hope that their focus on teaching would still allow them to be recognised as a world-class institution.

¡°Do you have to do excellent research to be a highly ranked university?¡± Dr Raper asked, wondering whether it should make a difference ¡°if we make an impact on the future workforce and on future industries¡­and society¡±.

simon.baker@timeshighereducation.com