Students Focus on What They Want

Abstract

As part of a consultation exercise conducted by LTSN Engineering, three focus groups have been facilitated to provide a snapshot of student opinion on learning and teaching in engineering subjects. The three institutions visited were a campus university and two city universities, one postand one pre-1992. The pre-1992 institution had a high proportion of local students from an ethnic minority group. Although there were some local differences, there were some comments that were repeated during all three sessions. This paper will report the results of the focus groups, identifying the common themes that were of importance to the students within their own learning experiences, including methods that helped them to learn. It is interesting to note that the students had fairly low expectations and identified easy to implement activities.