Intensive mode teaching of a humanitarian engineering course to enhance service-learning

Service-learning is a common component of many humanitarian engineering education programs. Students engage with external organisations and communities, often spending time intensively, on projects linked to their studies. To help prepare students for substantial service-learning initiatives a dedicated humanitarian engineering course was developed. To better represent service-learning and enable a greater variety of teaching and learning activities, the course was delivered over five weeks using intensive mode teaching. This enabled a portion of the class to be involved with a two-week scaffolded immersive international experience running in parallel to the campus delivery. Threshold concept and capability theory was used to evaluate the course and identify what elements of the course supported or hindered development of student thresholds. Results identified the main student threshold to be the ability to take account of social factors in engineering design and the activities enabled by the intensive mode teaching were among the strongest contributions to the achievement of this threshold, in particular elements of the international experience. This highlights the opportunities for intensive mode teaching in supporting activities related to service-learning.