Development of an Information Quality Framework for Mechanical Engineering Modules with Enhanced Treatment for Pedagogical Content

Introduction

Technical and Vocational Education (TVE) systems are common throughout the world as they deliver specialised skills required by the modern industry. The primary focus of these systems is on practise based teaching and learning, and generally very limited importance is given to the pedagogical content. This leads to limited transfer of analysis, evaluation and creating skills within the teaching and learning process. Consequently, the newly trained engineers become restrict the fundamental conceptual and product development in modern industries. Alseddiqi et al (2010) has also pointed out the same issues in context of Engineering Education courses. It has been reported that Technical and Vocational Education systems are facing a number of challenges regarding the delivery of appropriate courses and skills required in the industry. It has been further observed that both the industry and the academia are suffering from lack of pedagogical content in engineering courses. An information quality framework has been proposed by Alseddiqi et al (2010) that takes into account some basics of pedagogical domain contents from Bloom’s Taxonomy. However, the proposed framework lacks in addressing the essential skills required in a professional engineer, which have been identified above as analytical, evaluation and creation.

Alseddiqi (2012) extended the information quality framework in order to evaluate the content of e-learning packages in engineering education courses with respect to two aspects, pedagogical and technological. This framework incorporates specific pedagogical and technological aspects as per modern industrial requirements. The e-learning system content from the technological aspect considers the following quality factors: intrinsic information quality, contextual information quality, and accessibility information quality. These factors are combined from existing information quality frameworks. The pedagogical aspects in the e-learning system content are represented as information quality factors, incorporated from the literature (interpretability, ease of understanding, representational consistency, and concise representation) as well as modern industrial needs (depth of knowledge, personal attributes, motivation, and integration of skills). Furthermore, one pedagogical quality element (interactivity) was added to accessibility information quality.

From the literature survey presented here, it has been identified that the pedagogical content in the existing information quality frameworks is severely limited, which restricts the fulfilment of the goals set by these models. In the present study, Alseddiqi’s (2012) extended model has been modified by increasing the quality dimensions, and providing an enhanced treatment to the pedagogical content for Mechanical Engineering modules. This next section presents educational and industrial requirements that must be satisfied by a suitably designed teaching and learning system.