Negotiating outcomes : challenges and opportunities with industry based student projects

There is a growing interest within Engineering and Industrial Design education in project based learning [1]. The reasons for incorporating this learning technique into industrial design programs include: exposing future graduates to the complexities that are associated with the new product development process [2, 3]; and introducing students to teamwork [4, 5], cross-functional communication [6] and design project coordination [7]. In order to prepare upcoming Industrial Designers to be able to operate successfully in increasingly complex work settings, the Industrial Design program at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) is teaming up with industry to provide final year students with industry-based projects. The introduction of Industry-Based Projects (IBPs) into the final year research projects have disrupted many set ways the traditional student projects have been run in the past. IBP have brought to light a number of important issues associated with the assessment process and views held by academics about desired student project outcomes and assessment that were left lying dormant in the past. This paper explores the challenges academics faced negotiating student outcomes and assessment while supervising IBPs.