Education

Research indicates that 75% of occupations in the fastest-growing industries will need digital and STEM skills.

We are fully embedding digital sciences and technologies across the entire Faculty of Engineering curriculum; delivering highly-trained digital-literate graduates across civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical and biomedical engineering disciplines.

Our flagship Bachelor of Engineering Honours degree has been refreshed with computing as a core component for all streams, and a sequence of projects over the four years.

One of these projects, in the second year, introduces students to data science and has them work on a team project that applies data science to an inter-disciplinary problem.

Further changes to be implemented from 2023 will allow greater flexibility in the curriculum, and introduce the concept of breadth specialisations in areas such as engineering data science, computer engineering, entrepreneurship and humanitarian engineering.

These will be open to most Bachelor of Engineering Honours students. For the first time, a mechanical engineering graduate will be ready to apply data science to solve key challenges in their domain and an aeronautical engineer will have the opportunity to learn about how digital electronics work.

Such cross-disciplinary training in various aspects of digital engineering is exactly what is needed in the engineer of the future, and the Digital Sciences Initiative will be at the forefront of this revolution in engineering education.

Besides the Bachelor of Engineering Honours, the Initiative will also impact courses led by the School of Computer Science.

A Cybersecurity and an Innovation and Entrepreneurship major/minor is being introduced to the Bachelor of Advanced Computing, and a brand new Master of Digital Health and Data Science has also launched for 2022.

These courses, together with existing ones such as the major in Computational Data Science, cover all the topics that underpin the digital future and give our graduates the right skills to be valuable contributors to the digital economy.

Most of our Bachelor's degrees can be combined with a partner degree so students can complete two degrees in a shorter time. This exposes students to a breadth of knowledge that employers seek in engineering and computing graduates.

Our Digital Science Initiative’s Continuing Education program will introduce short course micro-credentials to enhance the capacity of our workforce to utilise cutting-edge digital science and technology.

It is intended to be a natural part of the NSW and Australian ecosystem for lifelong training and skills development, which is particularly relevant due to the accelerating pace of change driven by digital technologies within modern society.

The program will leverage the research expertise of the Digital Science Initiative to accelerate the pace of translation of new knowledge into tools and skills that can be utilised by digital scientists, engineers, and social entrepreneurs.

We envision a world in which learners are able to conveniently access the training they need for the next stage of their career.

Learners will be able to take courses that suit their specific needs: standalone practical courses in focused areas to build hands-on experience that they need quickly, or stacking sets of micro-credentials to gain an award qualification over time.

Courses will be taught flexibly to maximise access by those who have work or caring responsibilities.

The short courses and micro-credentials will be developed with input from industry, to ensure that the skills developed will be relevant to the learners’ future jobs. The types of courses offered will include:

• Executive leadership and project management training programs to enhance the utilisation of digital technologies strategies in the development and execution of projects.
• Industry-focused rapid intensive courses to provide training that is desired by a particular workforce. Examples may include the use of machine learning for the analysis of medical image data, or the use of visual analytics for transport planning.
• Technology ‘refresher’ courses for learners to quickly pick up digital technologies that did not exist, or were not broadly in use, at the time of their prior study.

As part of the Digital Sciences Initiative, our undergraduate and postgraduate programs will implement a wide range of digital tools and technologies to facilitate, augment, and enhance the learning and teaching experience for our students.

The Initiative aims to increase Faculty staff participation in innovative education practices by encouraging peer mentoring, professional development opportunities, education research and education innovation support.

The Initiative seeks to focus on enhancing four pillars of engineering learning and teaching through the increased use of digital tools and technologies in combination with the latest learning and teaching and engineering education pedagogy within our programs.