Browsing by Author "Barker, Stephen G."
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Item Open Access Altered andragogy: lessons from lockdown for systems engineering education(The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), 2021-09-06) Barker, Stephen G.; Smith, Jeremy D.Systems Engineering (SE) is a largely interactive and applied discipline which has been mainly taught via face-to-face tuition. The move to online-only teaching due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic thus posed significant challenges for SE education. The andragogical strategy involved had to be rethought and redesigned such that key precepts of student learning could be maintained in a way that preserved the depth, intricacy, and richness of the SE discipline. The interdisciplinary approach adopted involved combining a constructivist viewpoint with integrated collaborative and reflective activities, based around inquiry-based learning to facilitate online learning at distance. This pedagogical construct relied on a multidisciplinary and iterative approach to curriculum and module delivery, employing multiple methods to redesign the teaching approach to ‘chunk’ material into sets that were more readily deliverable in short bursts, and more digestible without face-to-face interaction. This took in revisions to the traditional pedagogical approach to learning, and blended short live online sessions with self-paced tasks, supported by Q&A sessions and ‘thought bursts’ of key information to summarise key learning points. Learning technology and software tools were used to facilitate and promote interactive and group workshops, which was particularly challenging but proved useful in bridging generational gaps and preferences for certain learning styles. This paper details the andragogical approach taken to wholly online distance learning for SE, reflecting on how successful it was both initially and as it evolved. It also considers how future learning can be successfully facilitated, incorporating the pedagogical lessons learned from the last twelve months.Item Open Access Complexity and the art of education: A study of how to approach teaching more challenging engineering systems development concepts(The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), 2021-09-30) Barker, Stephen G.As the demand for ever more capable products increases, so too does the inherent complexity of the product itself in order to facilitate increased functionality. This is broadly true of products of all sizes, from mobile phones to automobiles to large infrastructure projects. This increased complexity makes specification, design, development and implementation more difficult to understand and achieve, potentially making the process and nature of product development more difficult to teach. There are a number of pedagogical factors to this, including the complexity of the subject, the ability of available teaching methods and technology to communicate and provide coverage of the topic, and the educational preferences of the students involved. This paper considers this issue through the prism of the design of a new masters-level course on complex engineering systems. Literature is analysed to study the nature of complexity in engineering systems development and the challenges it causes, and what mix of taught and experiential-learning might be most appropriate. Experience in delivering courses to masters students is also taken into account to gauge from an andragogical perspective what teaching methods have previously been successful in communicating subject matter that is for some difficult to understand. Feedback from students past and present is analysed to understand how different preferences affect the ability to understand more complex topics, in an attempt to assess how different students respond to different teaching methods. This analysis is used to propose an approach to enhance the education of complex systems design and development for masters students.Item Open Access Evaluating student perspectives on understanding of complex systems(The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), 2022-11-15) Barker, Stephen G.Advances in technological detail and sophistication have resulted in more complex products, systems and services which can be more difficult for individuals to conceptualise and understand. This eventuality has potential to increase risks and assumptions in the use, operation, and management over time of such products and therefore presents a growing problem for those who have to plan and undertake such activities. It can thus be seen as important that people are informed as to the possible ramifications of increased complexity, and this presents a challenge to educators in terms of how the notion of ever-increasing complexity can be taught and inculcated. Previous work has considered how this might be achieved, evaluating learner preferences, mechanisms to describe greater complexity and its effects, and teaching strategies which can facilitate that learning and understanding. This paper builds upon the earlier work in the light of having since delivered complex systems course content at masters level. By viewing the situation through the prism of student learning experience and using informal discussion with learners and formal feedback on factors such as comprehension of topic, ability to analyse and evaluate holistically, and capability to apply understanding to real-life business scenarios, this paper assesses areas that students perceived as difficult or challenging to explicate and actualise. This is then placed in the overall context of the course cohort to analyse trends and whether different students experienced problems with the same issues before suggesting a revised andragogical strategy to address issues and improve the student learning experience.Item Open Access Methods to measure and track population perception and support within a manual wargame(Sage, 2020-10-15) Smith, Jeremy D.; Barker, Stephen G.The outcomes of military campaigns depend to a large extent on the support of local and other wider population groups, so it is important to understand their perceptions. Here we briefly describe the approach used to represent support for organizations and factions in a professional wargame designed to represent military campaigns. This specific approach was developed originally using a simple marker track system that used a basic quantified set of relationships between military campaign effects and changes to the track levels. This marker track system was developed for military campaign wargames in the UK as a means to portray support or dissent in population groups relevant to the operations, but there was originally no mechanism to drive changes other than by expert judgment. Our improved approach continues the use of marker tracks but attempts to develop a more defensible method based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for linking events to changes and levels on the tracks. We conducted experiments to quantify the relative importance of each element in Maslow’s hierarchy. We then continued by conducting a further experiment to identify the impact of a set of effects seen in a wargame against the Maslow elements. This has led to a set of quantified scores that may be used to drive the modifications to the marker tracks when wargame events occur. These scores are based on our initial experiments and may be updated for a specific application, perhaps for a specific setting or location in the world. The revised or enhanced approach aims to produce a transparent solution that can be understood by a military or security analyst, thus facilitating refinement, updating, and change.Item Open Access On the resilience of systems of systems(IEEE, 2017-04) Summers, Matthew P.; Barker, Stephen G.The need to consider how systems can be made resilient to failure modes has gained increasing traction in the fields of systems thinking and systems design, and is now more widely studied, with authors identifying the potential disruptive effects of failure upon a system, and codifying these disruptions into specific types. When the focus of specification moves from the bounded single system to the consideration of capability and effect, systems-of-systems, rather than systems must be contended with. Systems-of-systems have been classified as being of a number of types (acknowledged, collaborative, directed, virtual, for example), whilst authors have endeavoured to characterise the properties of systems-of-systems, and the difficulties associated with their design, introduction and operation. This study has invariably arrived at the conclusion that systems-of-systems are infinitely more complex than bounded single systems, and as the final system-of-systems design will still need to be resilient to failure, this in turn poses more difficult questions for the study of resilience, as the properties of a bounded single system are unlikely to be the same as those of a system-of-systems. This paper will consider the problems faced by the need to specify resilience in a system-of-systems environment, by first evaluating how the various types and properties of systems-of-systems might affect the consideration of resilience, and then proposes an initial codification of systems-of-systems resilience disruption types, along with recommendations and required further work.Item Open Access Robust decision making for agile systems development Part 2: a decomposition and analysis(2015-08-24) Barker, Stephen G.; Summers, Matthew P.The need for agility in operational systems within the defence enterprise and procurement domains has been identified by many authors, and over time, there have been a number of initiatives and programmes that have sought to identify the nature of agility, and the means by which it can be defined and employed within individual cases and scenarios. These have identified impediments to the successful realization of agile practices and methods, particularly the resilience of agile decision making throughout the conceptual understanding, design and implementation of the operational system. To further investigate the extent to which this process can be implemented in a robust and reliable manner, Cranfield University created the ‘Robust Enterprise-based Approach for Agility in Capability Through-life (REA2CT)’ framework, which provides a number of functional steps to institute a systems development lifecycle approach to producing agile solutions for use in networked systems and systems-of-systems. This paper builds upon the description of the framework[1] by applying the Axiomatic Design (AD) theory to identify where complexity exists within the requirements and design activities that underpin the framework. Using this analysis, this paper identifies ‘pain points’ within the REA2CT framework, and suggests necessary improvements to facilitate the implementation of agility throughout the systems development lifecycle.Item Open Access Scenario selection method for system scenario analysis(INCOSE, 2016-11) Ferris, Timothy L. J.; Barker, Stephen G.; Adcock, R. D.Scenario analysis is a frequently-used method to explore what a proposed system is required to do in the early phases of system development leading towards finding system requirements. A system which is intended to perform a variety of roles under a range of conditions is likely to result in the need for a quantity of scenarios that becomes intractably pluriform. The consequence of too many scenarios is that either the number of scenarios to be analysed must be reduced to a manageable number or the analysis is likely to be perfunctory, diminishing the value of the analysis. We present a method for reducing the number of scenarios to be analysed through study of the organization of the factors which distinguish scenarios from each other, and for selecting which scenarios need analysis through identifying their points of commonality and identifying where differences may impact system capability. Our method organises the types and potential values of factors related to a particular system development in order to reduce the number of scenarios to be investigatedItem Open Access Supporting students in a changing educational climate: A systems engineering case study(The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), 2021-01-21) Barker, Stephen G.Whilst the coronavirus pandemic has posed andragogical and pedagogical challenges to educational establishments in how they restructure courses to permit continued delivery in an online world, it has also caused significant disruption to students, not least in terms of how they have maintained their ability to continue to study and learn. A significant element in this is how student learning preferences such as experiential/practical or traditional lecture-based study have been served or disrupted by the revised delivery mechanism(s). This is particularly the case where the subject matter is management or engineering-related, and requires a great deal of interaction and collaborative multi-stakeholder work. Where the course is being taught at level seven, and therefore requires self-directed learning, this is even more the case. This paper considers those student learning preferences in this light, and studies the extent to which teaching andragogy has been modified to utilise activities which safeguard learning styles and facilitate continued effective learning. To do this, different learning styles and preferences are analysed, and a study is made of how these were satisfied in pre-pandemic education, using a Systems Engineering MSc course as a case study. Practice during the coronavirus pandemic is then considered to gauge how effective changes to course delivery made necessary by the situation were in supporting learners during this period and facilitating their further study and progression toward their desired qualification. Successes and failures are described, and conclusions are reached on how learning preferences can be better supported andragogically on an ongoing basis.Item Open Access System scenario selection method for faster analysis(INCOSE, 2017-08-30) Ferris, Timothy L. J.; Barker, Stephen G.Scenario analysis is a frequently-used method to explore what a proposed system is required to do in the early phases of system development leading towards finding system requirements. A system which is intended to perform a variety of roles under a range of conditions is likely to result in the need for a quantity of scenarios that becomes intractably pluriform. The consequence of too many scenarios is that either the number of scenarios to be analyzed must be reduced to a manageable number or the analysis is likely to be perfunctory, diminishing the value of the analysis, or the total effort required for the analyses may become unjustifiably great given the value of the project and the risks associated with it. We present a method for reducing the number of scenarios to be analyzed through study of the organization of the factors which distinguish scenarios from each other, and for selecting which scenarios need analysis through identifying their points of commonality and identifying where differences may impact system capability. Our method organizes the types and potential values of factors related to a particular system development in order to reduce the number of scenarios to be investigated. We illustrate our approach with a simple case developed for the purpose of this paper.Item Open Access Training and education in defence wargaming(ISMOR, 2018-12-31) Smith, Jeremy D.; Barker, Stephen G.Presentation paper given by Jeremy Smith and Steve Barker at a series of Wargaming Workshops given over the conference period 17th - 20th July, 2018.Item Open Access Understanding agile: a case study in educational complexity(The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), 2023-11-11) Barker, Stephen G.As the nature of engineering concepts, products and processes becomes more intricate and detailed, so the task of understanding, managing and implementing them becomes more complex. This paper takes one such development concept, Agile, and examines how the orthogonal, multi-faceted nature of both the concept and its application makes it difficult to understand and employ and considers in this context the andragogical difficulties posed when trying to teach it to level 7 students. The practice of Agile is often considered to be either the application of methods such as Scrum, extreme programming (XP) or Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), or the implementation of agile values or principles. In practice, however, a greater level of complexity exists and many more facets need to be considered, such as organisational structure, suitability of project and product, skill set of individuals, and even the mind set of those involved, because the adoption of agile requires more than the use of a technique as part of normal business procedures. In order to understand the complexity of a concept such as agile and the implications which it poses for andragogical teaching and learning strategies, the nature of the concept is first considered to identify the challenges that it creates for education, before a mapping of teaching strategies to agile facets is produced, and thought is given to the creation of an andragogical mechanism which will promote and engender student understanding of the concept and how it can be applied across a range of topic areas in context.