USQ professor wins textbook prize

A USQ professor of Engineering Education has been awarded a coveted Australian Education Publishing award.

Professor David Dowling is a joint winner of the prestigious Best Tertiary Education Original Textbook Prize for authoring a textbook with fellow Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) grant recipients and co-authors Dr Anna Carew from the University of Tasmania and Discipline Scholar Associate Professor Roger Hadgraft from The University of Melbourne.

Engineering your future: An Australasian guide serves as an introduction to the profession of engineering for students, focusing on topics such as design process, communication, teamwork, sustainability and ethics; all critical knowledge and skills sets for engineering practitioners.

'The book aims to provide first year engineering students with a solid grounding in the engineering method, and the tools and techniques used to complete each stage of the method,' Professor Dowling said.

Judges commented that the book encouraged students to make the link between theory and practice by engaging with case studies based on real social issues, and then to apply and extend their knowledge.

According to the judging panel, the text is the first of its kind in this discipline and was to be commended for its fresh, stimulating and gender-neutral approach.

It has been adopted as a text by 23 of the 36 Australian and New Zealand universities that have engineering programs, and is being used across the curriculum, not only in first year. It is expected that more universities will adopt the book in 2011.

The award is judged on criteria such as the design of the book, the level of innovation from a publishing perspective and its overall impact on the market.