A somewhat special experience I currently enjoy happens when people who know me (more or less well) refer in one friendly way or another to the fact that I have returned to being a senior lecturer—a true academic and practitioner—in my field of Mechanical Engineering. Very often the exchange begins with the person, of whom I am an acquaintance or friend, commenting that I seem far more relaxed or happier since I returned to the lecturing role. Judging from what people say to me, it sounds as though I appeared uncomfortable, unhappy, or both in the role of Head of School. Overall, this would not capture how I actually felt generally while I was in the role, although I am sure I felt like that on occasion. I felt proud and honoured to be in a role of serving learners and colleagues. I do not regret the time that I spent as Head of School and there are many memories that I cherish from that period.
It would be another story to explain what I did or tried to do as Head of School. Overall, I believe I did a good job, but there is a strange kind of satisfaction in realising that I was not indispensible and was perfectly capable of being replaced. When I decided that I preferred not to continue in that role, I did the right thing for myself and for the institute, even though I had to take a very significant drop in salary in moving two levels to what is, effectively, the highest full-time academic teaching and research role that one can have in the institute. In my institute the academic title of Professor, which I have been awarded, is not linked (with notable exceptions) to one’s grade or salary, so I am both a Senior Lecturer (Teaching) and a Professor.
I have the great privilege of working in a place where there is diversity and variety and where people are generally very friendly. The opportunities to meet and engage with others are excellent. There is an ethos of practicality and, in relative terms, very little elitism. Commitment levels among the staff are generally high, especially commitment to the support and welfare of learners, whether apprentices, undergraduates, trainees, or postgraduates. There is a hierarchical structure with layers of managers at the top and practitioners at the bottom. There is also a developing trend towards formal evaluation of those below by those above. Perhaps there is still some scope for counter-balancing this through the provision of some degree of accountability of those at the top to those below as, for instance, in modern democracies.
I am frequently asked how I find my new role in relation to the exalted role I previously held. Nobody ever used that particular adjective, but the role of Head of School could seem, from comments people make, to be a difficult and stressful one that nobody would want. Nevertheless, whenever such a role becomes available there are plenty of willing candidates and it is unusual for holders of such roles to opt to revert to lower roles. Often the questioner implies that my new role must be a lot easier than my old one and that I must be enjoying not having to work too hard.
The answers I give vary a bit. I would typically say that I am enjoying my new role, that I enjoy teaching and working with students, that there are challenges in being a lecturer and that I am still working as hard as ever.
The academic year has been a very busy one for me and, while I have enjoyed the work and the challenges, I have found it difficult to do my job as well as I would have liked and it has not been possible to function in the way that professors usually function elsewhere. On average over the academic year I had sixteen timetabled contact hours per week, which included four hours for supervising two PhD students during the first semester and two hours for supervising one PhD student during the second semester. Over the full academic year, three of my contact hours were associated with the supervision of six final year student projects on the BE degree programme. I had less-than-average contact hours during the first semester and higher-than-average contact hours during the second semester.
During the first semester I delivered one module of three lecture hours per week: Applied Energy Systems 1, which dealt with basic fluid mechanics, hydrostatic power systems and flow in pipes. This was for year two of the BEngTech degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Building Services Engineering. I also demonstrated the two laboratory experiments for this module—I spent two two-hour sessions in the Fluids Laboratory each week. There were about 110 students in the class group for the module: about two thirds from Mechanical Engineering and one third from Building Services Engineering. The items I have mentioned brought my contact hours to 14 per week over the first semester.
I started preparing for my lectures in Applied Energy Systems 1 & 2 before the academic year began. I worked with all the information that was available to me, but I found I could only decide exactly what was required when the timetables had been finalised at the start of the academic year and after having had opportunity for discussions with academic and technical colleagues. Indeed, I was only able to firm-up my delivery approach after starting to work with the student group and beginning to get the feel of what the students required and what seemed to work. In the area of theory for the Applied Energy Systems 1 module there was nothing that was new or difficult for me, because of my engineering experience and the fact that I had previously lectured on somewhat similar modules at Carlow Institute of Technology (a long time ago) and at Trinity College. However, I had work to do to find suitable up-to-date textbooks as background references and to tease out how best to treat some of the technical items that were on the syllabus—there was no single textbook available that encompassed the entire scope of the module. Colleagues who had been associated with the module in the recent past were very helpful to me.
On an ongoing basis over the semester, I prepared a new set of notes for the Applied Energy Systems 1 module, complete with diagrams. I prepared new laboratory sheets and tutorial sheets too. I made extensive use of Webcourses, the Institute’s chosen web-based instructional support system, and a lot of time was taken up with various aspects of this—which would be another story. I prepared an optional revision assessment and a mid-term assessment, both of which were delivered through Webcourses. I also ran a team assignment. I arranged that laboratory reports (summary reports) were submitted through Webcourses by the students and I did reasonably well in grading them and providing some individual feedback during the semester.
With the amount of work I had, I was not able to devote adequate time to research (much of my own free time was already being taken up). Of the two PhD students, one had submitted his thesis just before the start of the semester (I had done a lot of work in connection with this over the summer months), but there were nonetheless various matters to deal with until the viva had taken place and the final version of the thesis (incorporating minor corrections) had been submitted; I was not able to spend what I would have considered adequate time in working with the other PhD student. I had no available time within which to pursue research funding possibilities or, for example, to review papers for journals when asked. I prepared my lecture notes, tutorial sheets and solutions, lab sheets, a mid-term assessment, and my end-of-semester and supplemental examination papers and solutions on an as-needed basis. I struggled to keep barely ahead throughout the semester. It was difficult to submit my exam papers by the required deadline, at a point where I had only part of the material covered. This was not because I was unfamiliar with the material or the types of questions that had been asked in the past: it was because it was difficult at that stage to foresee the depth to which I would be able to treat later topics and I had not yet prepared all of the notes that would normally serve as the basis for drafting the exam questions.
On Tuesday 11th November, 2009, I gave a lunchtime talk for colleagues about Mathematica. My PhD student’s PhD viva took place on Friday 13th November and went very well.
I did not say that the first semester was tough, but the second was certainly a lot tougher than the first. I delivered a module of the Master of Engineering programme in Mechanical Engineering: Heat and Mass Transfer. This module had only been delivered once before, by a part-time lecturer. Essentially, the information I had to go on consisted of the module descriptor and the previous annual exam paper that had been set. The module was based on two contact hours per week: the lectures took place from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Monday evenings. The class size was about 40. Such lecturing, after 6 p.m., carried a weighting of 1.5, so this was considered equivalent to three contact hours. I also delivered the Applied Energy Systems 2 module (which was an introduction to thermodynamics). This was with the same class group of second year BEngTech students that I had had in the first semester. I also delivered the laboratory sessions for Applied Energy Systems 2, spending two two-hour sessions in the Thermodynamics Laboratory each week for this.
In addition, I demonstrated four experiments for a Thermodynamics class group of about 80 second-year students of the BE degree programmes in Mechanical Engineering, Manufacturing Engineering and Civil and Building Services Engineering. In fact there were five experiments in all and another lecturer was assigned to these with me, but as things worked out I ended-up demonstrating or co-demonstrating four of the five experiments and grading four-fifths of the reports. I revised the lab sheets for the practicals that I demonstrated. I spend two two-hour sessions per week in the Thermodynamics Laboratory for these practicals, bringing my total time in the Thermodynamics Laboratory per week to eight hours. Lecture preparation and assessments (for the Heat and Mass Transfer module as well as this module) had to take priority and I found it impossible to grade the reports in the way I would have liked, with feedback. I had to grade all the reports after the lecture term ended and after I had marked all exam scripts. A complaint that students commonly make relates to lack of feedback on assignments, or being given only marks without explanations. I graded about 200 reports for this class group alone. Each hour of demonstrating in the lab would have given rise to four summary reports to correct. My contact hours per week in the second semenster, based on the items mentioned, came to 19.
It is common in universities around the world for postgraduate research students to demonstrate experiments in laboratories and to grade the lab reports. The opposite was the case for the year 2 Thermodynamics class group of the BE degree programmes, mentioned above. A PhD student, who was employed as a part-time lecturer, delivered the module content, while a full-time lecturer and a professor, I, demonstrated the experiments and graded the reports. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this, but it serves to illustrate that, in the framework within which the institute has to operate, all academic work is measured in contact hours and all contact hours are considered equal.
The time pressure I was under during the second semester stemmed from the fact that I was delivering two full modules (one at master’s level) for the first time. This required many hours of preparation for each hour of delivery. In the case of Applied Energy Systems 2, I was on home ground with the thermodynamics content. However, it was still very time-consuming to prepare the lectures, notes and tutorial question sheets with solutions. I also prepared a mid-term assessment, which was delivered through Webcourses.
In the case of the Heat and Mass Transfer module, I reckon that I spent at least six hours of study and preparation for each hour of delivery. Over the Christmas holidays and over the exam break (other than when I was marking scripts) before the second semester began I carried out extensive preparation for this module. However, I still struggled during every single week of the semester to have sufficient preparation done for the lectures on Monday evenings. Although I have previously lectured on the topic of heat transfer at Trinity College and have often made use of heat transfer theory and principles in my research, I am not a specialist in the area of heat transfer and have never undertaken research specifically in this area. I adopted the highly respected textbook ‘Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer’ by Incropera et al. (which contained almost a thousand pages) as the course textbook. I also made use of presentation slides that I obtained from the publishers, Wiley. I have some reservations about the appropriateness of delivering a master’s level module in this way—in my view, modules at master’s level should ideally be delivered by lecturers who are active in research in the particular area. Nonetheless, there was a job to be done and I tackled the task in a professional way, within the constraints that existed. From a personal viewpoint, I learned a great deal about heat and mass transfer.
The Heat and Mass Transfer module involved many complicated formulae, which required to be evaluated or solved. I considered various ways of addressing this and decided upon using a free and open-source computer algebra system called Maxima. I made use of this throughout the module and provided sample calculations for the various topics through Webcourses. Some of these examples took a lot of time to work out, most notably demonstrations of the finite difference technique for solving heat transfer problems.
The research I have done during the academic year has mainly been that in conjunction with my current PhD student, which also involved collaboration with a colleague in France and a colleague in Romania. On the basis of this work we submitted a paper for the 2010 ASME Energy Sustainability Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, and I went there to present it from the 18th to the 22nd of May. This shortened the number of days I had available for correcting exams and I made that time up by working solidly through two week-ends (one of which was the June bank holiday week-end). My work with six final-year project students also constituted part of my research. One of the projects has resulted in a conference paper, which is to be presented by the student at the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Protection, SEEP2010, conference in Bari, Italy, in July 2010.
For the past year I have been a member of the Academic Quality Enhancement Committee. However, because of my teaching commitments I have only been able to attend one of the meetings and have sent my apologies for all of the others. My inability to attend those meetings was a pure consequence of workload and the high number of timetabled contact hours. I believe other academic staff members on the committee may have had similar difficulties in being able to attend meetings. Some other members of the committee were in management or support roles, where the challenges of fitting meetings into their busy schedules would have been different. It seems to me that it is very difficult for a fully-timetabled and hard-working academic to participate effectively in the committee structures that are common within the institute, or even in such an important body as Academic Council (on which there are some elected representatives of ordinary academic staff).
The pass rate for my Applied Energy Systems 1 examination in January 2010 was very disappointing. Any mark below the pass mark indicated that the learning outcomes that I expected to be met, based on the module descriptor and past exam papers, were not met to my satisfaction. I experienced considerable pressure to increase the marks and I did so, which improved the pass rate somewhat.
For the Applied Energy Systems 2 examination in May 2010 the pass rate was noticeably better because of a range of factors. One of these was that a colleague, who was a PhD student and a part-time lecturer, was engaged separately by each of the two departments involved to provide additional tutorial support. Communication between my colleague and me was good and I made all of my course materials available to him. However, a somewhat unfortunate aspect of this for me was that it made it hard to ascertain exactly which factors had led to the improvement in the second semester results compared to the results for Applied Energy Systems 1 in the first semester.
The end-of-year results for the Heat and Mass Transfer module that I delivered were very good and the average marks were rather high. It is a real challenge to place results like this into an absolute context. I put a huge amount of work into devising continuous assessment tests, delivered through Webcourses, that would bring the students through the various aspects of heat and mass transfer that they needed to learn about. At the same time, I wanted to eliminate as far as possible the need to learn off equations by rote, so I provided all relevant equations for the written exam. I allowed the students to take each of the continuous assessment tests (of which there were four) up to three times and I gave them credit for the highest result they achieved.
To be an academic is to strive continually for high standards and to try new things, sometimes making mistakes and learning from them. I like that. In my experience, an academic has a lot more within their own control than a middle-manager has. A difficulty faced by the academic and the manager alike is how to impart motivation and work ethic. If I ever figure that one out I’ll surely write it up as a blog.