Bringing sustainability to life: A framework to guide biodiversity indicator development for business performance management

Biodiversity loss is a critical sustainability issue, and companies are beginning to seek ways to assess their biodiversity performance. Initiatives to date have developed biodiversity indicators for specific business contexts (e.g., spatial scales – from site, to product, to regional, or corporate scales), however many are not widely translatable across different contexts making it challenging for businesses seeking indicators to manage their biodiversity performance. By synthesizing the steps of common conservation and business decision-making systems, we propose a framework to support more comprehensive development of quantitative biodiversity indicators, for a range of business contexts. The framework integrates experience from existing tried-and-tested conservation frameworks. We illustrate how our framework offers a pathway for businesses to assess their biodiversity performance, and demonstrate responsible management by mitigating and reversing their biodiversity impacts and sustaining their dependencies, enabling them to demonstrate their contribution to emerging global biodiversity targets (e.g., Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 targets)

Articulating the learning : professional practice made explicit

The Diploma of Professional Practice at Central Queensland University has been developed to explicitly prepare students in the Bachelor of Engineering (Co-op) program for their industrial work placement, and then to enable them to articulate the learnings from that placement. The Diploma is a compulsory element of the Co-operative Education program, and awarded as the dual award BEng (Co-op)/Dip Prof Prac Eng at graduation.The Diploma of Professional Practice, equips graduates with the knowledge, skills and attributes needed in professional practice and for professional leadership. The combined program is designed around the triple themes of intellectual, social and professional development. A feature of the professional practice program is its integration with the periods of work placement in a professional environment that provides the opportunity to learn and put into practice, professional practice skills. The existing work placements are highly regarded by employers, and this program provides students with the education to maximise the learning occurring in the professional environment. The program is structured with internal courses delivered before and after work placement periods which provide preparation and review of skills, that will be put into practice in the work place, as well as reflection on the learning.The program is a generic program providing students with the necessary professional practice skills to go into the placement and the opportunity to reflect upon their experiences in the workplace. It is through this reflective process that the implicit learning from the work placement becomes explicit assessable learning

Developing professional practice skills through reflection on experience

The Bachelor of Engineering program at Central Queensland University, has evolved through a number of innovations over 15 years into the unique dual award program of the Bachelor of Engineering (Co-op)/Diploma of Professional Practice. This program is unique in that it includes co-operative education, Project Based Learning (PBL) (in on campus and external modes) and an explicit development of professional practice skills through the Diploma of Professional Practice. This development started in 1994 with the introduction of co-operative education, giving the students two placements of six months each during their study. To help prepare students to be junior professionals at the end of their second year of study, a PBL philosophy, with a partially inverted curriculum was introduced in 1998. Recognition that learning from the workplacements would need to be made explicit was addressed by the introduction of the Diploma of Professional Practice in 2004. All the courses in the Diploma are based on reflective practice, and are aimed at developing professional practice skills that are an outcome of the work placements The combined program is designed around the triple themes of intellectual, social and professional development. The result is that students are able to articulate their learning, and recognise their strengths and weaknesses in these areas at any stage in their program of study

Engineering education research groups in Australia: implications for Australasian engineering educators

Learning and teaching innovation is becoming more necessary in engineering, particularly with the new Engineers Australia Stage 1 Competencies and the 'voucher' system starting in 2012. There is also increasing pressure on academics to undertake research and publish. In Australia, a small number of groups have formed to meet these challenges and help engineering academics develop their education research practices. However while these groups have developed in and are focused on their local context, the factors that influenced their creation and support or hinder their growth have implications for similar groups in future. This paper aims to compare and contrast three such groups to identify essential elements of engineering education research groups in Australasia. Three case studies are presented from the perspective of the coordinators of the groups, along with a thematic analysis conducted across the three cases

An information source for improving safe design decisions

While it is important to recognize that business risk, safety, performance and optimisation depend on the events that occur on the shopfloor, there must be a method for managers to use these issues within their decision making processes. The call for papers for this conference states that “success of our future business endeavours relies not only on information, but establishing which information is relevant, instructive and useful to make increasingly complex decisions.” Information that allows organizations to learn from accidents without repeating them will be of vital importance in any sustainable organization. This paper outlines how a transdisciplinary approach to engineering design, incorporating the disciplines of Engineering, Occupational Health and Safety and the Coroner can help management make decisions that result in safer work environments as well as better products. The paper reports on the process of developing a web based data base that is industrially focused and draws on coronial data to identify design issues that will have safety implications. The outcome from this project for organisations in general will be an improvement in the products and processes that are made available, and the confidence to know that accidents should not be repeated

Influencing student designers towards safe design : transdisciplinarity and the journey of the devox

Could a change of paradigm be developed in future designers (students) to incorporate people at the original concept stage of the design cycle to create safe design? An action research project with a transdisciplinary approach was used to embed an ergonomics philosophy within the technical framework of the engineering design cycle for engineering students . This paper reports the learning from five cycles within a transdisciplinary environment. The learning model has positively impacted on the practice of current students. The most encouraging findings from this research were that undergraduate interventions did change the professional practice paradigm of early career engineers. The research also lays the foundation for developing continuing professional education models for current professionals, which refocuses the design process on human centred engineering design

Virtuous reality : the development of safe design through transdisciplinary teams

The development of safe design as an aspect of professional practice has been the impetus for an action learning project, using an innovative teaching model at CQUniversity, Australia. This transdisciplinary, project orientated, teaching and learning model, brings together the two disciplines of ergonomics and engineering with a view to shifting the paradigms of engineering education to include human factors in design, and ergonomic education to include technical design issues. The cornerstone of the project is the recognition and development of personal and shared ‘virtues’ within the project team and learning community. The defined virtues create a common language of communication and perception, person to person, to create a team dynamic and provide an integration of cultures for the effective integrated activity of disciplines – effectively developing a shared ‘culture of character’. Transdisciplinary teams built on this foundation focus on joint goals in a safe learning environment and with a commitment to higher ideals. There are various contexts that make up the ‘reality’ part of the project. The over arching reality is the contextual reality. The socio-technical context of the Project, which created the original impetus, is the real life lack of ergonomics/human factors input into the education of future engineering professionals, a lack highlighted by a national review of engineering education in1996, and supported by further research. It is commonly accepted that latent error in engineering design causes accidents. This lack of ergonomic input needed to be addressed. The Project was designed to facilitate the necessary interaction and to provide future professionals in both disciplines with new, overlapping skill sets. Other contextual elements are sustainability, safe design, a systems approach and human centred engineering. The Project has been through a number of cycles based on action research methodology. Different levels of disciplinary activity have evolved during the course of the project, ranging from disciplinary: within the defined discipline, multidisciplinary: between the disciplines, through interdisciplinary: across the disciplines and finally to transdisciplinary: between, across and beyond the disciplines.This paper outlines the project and its outcome for the students and staff involved

A transdisciplinary approach to reducing workplace injury through the use of coronial reports

The concept of the engineering profession working with the Coroner in an attempt to reduce the rate of injury in the workplace is presented. The paper briefly looks at the role of both the engineering profession and the coroner in relation to safety. The output of the coroner – findings and recommendations following death – is considered as an input to engineering design. Two uses of the coronial information are suggested. Those are case studies in undergraduate education, and the development of publicly accessible databases identifying root causes of workplace accidents. Current work in both areas is presented. All this is presented with the background of a transdisciplinary approach