Educating the engineer of the future – Faculty of Engineering launches Envision 2010

New project to enhance Imperial’s Engineering Faculty as an international leader in education - News

Thursday 1 February 2007
By Naomi Weston

A project to maintain and enhance Imperial’s position as an international leader in engineering education has moved into its next phase. EnVision 2010 was officially launched last night with a dinner and presentation for key industry figures, hosted by Faculty Principal Dame Julia Higgins .

EnVision 2010 focuses on who, how and what the Faculty teaches with the aim of ensuring the Faculty of Engineering offers every engineering undergraduate the best possible education.

During December, an open invitation was sent by Julia Higgins to all academics, asking for their ideas and project proposals to enhance and develop Imperial’s engineering undergraduate education. A range of proposals have already been received from across the Faculty which will be considered by the EnVision Board over the coming weeks. It is hoped that a number of the successful schemes will be taken forward by the EnVision team during this academic year.

The first proposed project under the initiative will be the Racing Green project. Students from across the Faculty will design, build and race a zero-emission fuel-cell car. The project will also give students the opportunity to work on cutting edge fuel-cell research.

The idea behind the EnVision 2010 initiative originated from student and staff feedback. For example, students were keen for a greater development of their personal and professional skills and wanted to apply their knowledge in 'real-world' contexts. EnVision 2010 aims to achieve this through developing new departmental and cross-Faculty projects, which would help to inspire the students, develop their professional skills and deepen their engineering knowledge through application.

Dr Ruth Graham , Director of EnVision 2010, explains: "The project aims to ensure that the Faculty has equal confidence in its teaching strategy as that already secured in research. We believe that Imperial College is ideally placed to take the European lead in engineering education."

Issues that EnVision 2010 will examine include how the College rewards and supports academic staff, how to motivate and inspire undergraduates and how to improve and develop teaching spaces in the Faculty. One early focus of the project is to establish a number of new scholarships for undergraduate students, for example the Rolls-Royce Engineering Scholarship for Energy Efficient Technologies.

Dame Julia Higgins, Principal of the Faculty of Engineering, says: "EnVision has been in the planning phase up until the beginning of the year. Now we are underway and will start to deliver some of the exciting ideas generated."