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TopIntroduction
The tensions between developing the technical skills of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) programmes at undergraduate level, with demands from industry for more rounded graduate entrants possessing soft skills, is a global issue. This has been highlighted by the OECD skills strategy (2019) with examples from government bodies in Australia (Office of the Chief Scientist, 2016), the EU (Caprile et al. 2015, European Round Table, 2018) and the ASEAN countries (Reeve 2016).
This study is based in the UK, where Government policy (QAA 2009, House of Lords 2015) and, more recently, the McKinsey report on the technological skills gap in the UK workforce (Bughin et al., 2018) demonstrate the importance for high-level digital and soft skills. A critical review of UK STEM degree provision and graduate employability recommended improving the work readiness of students by embedding the development of soft skills into degree programmes (Wakeham, 2016). Subsequent McKinsey Insight reports (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022) identify the continuing requirement for technical graduates ready for the workplace. The response from the accrediting bodies was to require personal development planning (PDP) as part of STEM curricula. The university in this study implemented personal development planning across all its programmes; with core skills of team working, communication, report writing, academic research, organisation and planning. For computing students, the requirement to pass the ‘PDP’ element was embedded within their compulsory first year design module. However, this approach was unsuccessful as fourteen percent of the student cohort failed to pass the PDP unit, leading to progression issues.
A review of the module metrics and student feedback identified that students were aware of the wider needs of developing softer skills for industry, however, these were viewed as peripheral to the core technical content of their degree. This review identified that the teaching was didactic, with assessment tasks peripheral to the learning outcomes, what Biggs (2003) refers to as an unaligned curriculum. A reconceptualisation of the delivery of the module was required, to bridge between the wider needs of industry and to engage the students with the whole of their curriculum. This paper reports on a four-year study, involving 411 students and 6 members of staff, and has University ethics approval.
The objectives of this paper are:
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to build theory and demonstrate the creative use of an innovative mobile technology integrated into a robust pedagogic framework
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to develop an action research methodology to provide the overarching conceptual framework for engaging students in the evolution of the curriculum
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share practice for the use of augmented reality for mobile learning
TopBackground
The work of Crompton and Burke (2018) in their systematic review of the use of mobile learning in higher education found the majority of studies focused on enhancing student achievement, with around three quarters of the studies framed within undergraduate provision. Just over 54% took part in formal settings, and more recent work (MacCallum and Parsons 2022) report on the affordances of mobile technologies for field work. Cochrane (2014), establishes a baseline for the use of mobile devices and points to the opportunities offered by the changes to institutional polices enabling student to ‘Bring their own device’ (BYOD); Clark et al. (2021) also found BOYD beneficial in fieldwork and supporting student learning. The trends on mobile learning were mapped by Lai (2020) who concluded in a study reviewing the 100 top cited papers that mobile learning places have changed from classrooms to real‐world contexts. A bibliometric review of mobile learning by Sobral (2020), considers smartphones to be ubiquitous, with these devices being used across Higher Education to enable communication, access reading material and to enhance individual study.