6th Teaching & Education Conference, Vienna

FINAL YEAR PROJECT ALLOCATIONS FOR UNDERGRADUATE ENGINEERING STUDENTS IN TNE PROGRAMS

KELUM GAMAGE , SAJJAD HUSSAIN, QAMMER H. ABBASI

Abstract:

Final year project allocations become a challenging task, particularly, in the case of a large number of undergraduate students enthusiast to get a project of their interest and/or to work with a supervisor of their choice. The problem is challenging as the interest of all the students should be matched while keeping the staff workload in balance. It becomes a matching problem with the constraints of staff workload, student preferences, and staff skillset. Particularly, in the Transnational Education (TNE) programs, the physical availability (or lack of it) of the staff plays an important part in the student project selections which gives an additional challenge to the allocation problem. Authors provide a review of different final year project allocation methods currently in practice and discuss their strengths and weaknesses with respect to the constraints highlighted. Authors finally conclude by discussing an algorithm which can work effectively and efficiently in the context of project allocations for TNE progragrams.

Keywords: Transnational Education (TNE), Final year projects, Matching problem, project allocations, staff workload

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