Postgraduate

Team engineering aims to develop the essential professional engineering skill of working with others. You’ll work as part of a small project team, formed at the first weekend residential school. Projects will encompass a broad sweep of engineering, requiring co-operative development of the knowledge and skills needed to analyse an engineering system and produce a revised specification for that system. You’ll work together in a team via email, telephone and FlashMeeting, under guidance from your tutor. Your team’s results will be presented and assessed at the second residential weekend school and through submission of a written report.

Register for the course

This course is available for study in the countries shown. Fees and financial support may vary by country.

What you will study

This course provides an opportunity for you to explore an engineering ‘problem’ in depth, working as part of a small team. The problem could be developing a product, such as a car door, improving a manufacturing process, such as forming steel sheet, or working with a variety of other engineering systems. Whatever the problem, its investigation will cover technical, environmental and business aspects and many will include a computing/software dimension.

At the first of two residential weekends, which takes place at the very start of the course, you will learn about functioning effectively as a team and get to know each other by confronting a variety of practical and intellectual challenges. You will join with fellow students to form a team of about five. Your team will select its engineering problem from those on offer and refine it into a ‘project’. Each member of the team will take on a different area of individual responsibility for the investigation to come.

After the first weekend, and working at a distance from the other team members, you will individually and jointly pursue agreed lines of enquiry on your engineering project. Your progress through the project is charted in your team wiki, in online video conference records of team meetings and in team and individual reports, submitted as tutor-marked assignments.

All the teams will report back at the second residential weekend some 20 weeks later. This will give you a chance to engage in discussions with other students and staff members before developing a plan for your final project report, which is your end-of-module assessment (EMA). This is submitted several weeks later.

T885 is a not a content-focused course. Instead, you and your team will be responsible for gathering together the information you need to pursue your project. You will be supplied with a project brief and with background material about group working and project management. You will have access to a full range of information resources through the internet and online or conventional libraries. You will keep in touch with your tutor and work collaboratively with your fellow team members through email and online forums.

Vocational relevance

T885 will be the culmination of work towards your MEng (M03) degree or Postgraduate Diploma in Engineering (E22) – and is aimed at providing the academic base for professional recognition as a Chartered Engineer.

Residential school

Satisfactory attendance at the first residential school is required. Non-attendance at the first weekend will result in you being withdrawn from T885 and losing a proportion of fees paid, the remainder of which can be used as a discount towards the cost of the same or another module on a later presentation if used within 18 months of the start of T885. Should you not be able to attend the second residential weekend, you will lose a proportion of the continuous assessment marks for T885. If a number of students from the same team are unable to attend the second residential weekend, this may affect the team’s score for EMA03 (the team presentation to be given at the second residential school). Residential weekends for the September presentation are usually in September and February. For the February presentation, the residential weekends are usually in February or late January and June. The cost of the residential weekends is included in the fee. See our Residential Schools website for more information.

Entry

Registration is restricted to those who have satisfactorily completed 90 credits of approved postgraduate study and who have otherwise completed the requirements for the MEng (M03) or the Postgraduate Diploma in Engineering (E22). After you have reserved a place on T885, we will check that you fulfil the entry requirements and your reservations may be cancelled if you do not. We aim to confirm back to you about your place on the course within two weeks.

You do need to have a reasonable standard of spoken and written English to study successfully with us. Poor language skills will make study more difficult, and it will take longer. The normal requirements for English language skills are explained on our website.

If you have any doubts about whether your level of English is good enough for you to study this course you may find it helpful to look at our Skills for OU Study website.

If you have any doubt about the suitability of the course, please contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.

Outside the UK

The course is suitable for a European-wide audience, but you must attend the UK-based residential schools.

Qualifications

T885 is a compulsory module in our:

• Postgraduate Diploma in Engineering (E22)
• MEng (M03)
• MSc in Engineering (F46)

Some postgraduate qualifications allow study to be chosen from other subject areas. These qualifications allow most postgraduate modules to count towards them. We advise you to refer to the relevant qualification descriptions for information on the circumstances in which this module can count towards these qualifications because from time to time the structure and requirements may change.

Regulations

As a student of The Open University, you should be aware of the content of the Module Regulations and the Student Regulations which are available on our Essential documents website.

If you have a disability or additional requirement

Written transcripts of any audio components and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of printed material are available. Some Adobe PDF components may not be available or fully accessible using a screen reader. Alternative formats of the study materials may be available in the future. Our Services for disabled students website has the latest information about availability.

If you are a new student, or new to study using a computer or the internet, you will need to inform us of your particular needs as soon as possible, as some of our support services may take several weeks to arrange. Details of how to do this and our range of support services are described in our publications Meeting your needs and Meeting your residential school needs.

You can also find information about accessible study materials, the Disabled Students' Allowance, equipment and other services on our Services for disabled students website. It also includes our contact details for advice and support both before you register and while you are studying.

Study materials

What's included

Printed materials, DVD-ROM.

You will need

You will be using your computer regularly and extensively to maintain contact with your team, at times to be negotiated with your fellow team members. If you expect to use a computer from within a corporate network secured by a firewall, you should contact your IT department to make sure you will be able to use appropriate communications software. If you believe that this may be problem, you should get some more information from the T885 Curriculum manager before registering. For computing at home, it is strongly recommended that you have a broadband connection.

Computing requirements

You will need a computer with internet access to study this course. It includes online activities – you can only access using a web browser with Flash and Java – and some course software provided on disk.

• If you have purchased a new desktop or laptop computer running Windows since 2006 you should have no problems completing the computer-based activities.
• If you’ve got a netbook, tablet or other mobile computing device check our Technical requirements section.
• If you have an Apple Mac or Linux computer – please note that you can only use it for this course by running Windows on it using Boot Camp or a similar dual-boot system.

You can also visit the Technical requirements section for further computing information including the details of the support we provide.

Teaching and assessment

Support from your tutor

You will be allocated to your tutor at the first compulsory residential weekend. Your tutor will be responsible for monitoring your progress on the course, marking and commenting on your written work and you can contact them for advice and guidance. Your tutor will also mediate an online forum for your tutor group and oversee collaborative team-working tasks which are an essential feature of the course.

Contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service if you want to know more about study with The Open University before you register.

Assessment

The assessment details can be found in the facts box above.

You will be expected to submit your tutor-marked assignments (TMAs) online through the eTMA system unless there are some difficulties which prevent you from doing so. In these circumstances, you must negotiate with your tutor to get their agreement to submit your assignment on paper.

Two of the assignments will be joint submissions from your team, and two are personal accounts of your achievements and your contribution to the work of your team. The end-of-module assignment, which is submitted on paper, also consists of a group and individual project report.

Professional recognition

T885 is the compulsory module of the MEng (M03) and the Postgraduate Diploma in Engineering (E22) and provides the essential group-working skills required for graduates hoping to become Chartered Engineers.

Future availability

The details given here are for the course that starts in September 2012. We expect it to be available twice a year after that, in January and September.

Students also studied

Students who studied this course also studied at some time:

• Towards chartership: professional development for engineers (T398)
• Forensic engineering (T839)
• Problem solving and improvement: quality and other approaches (T889)
• Manufacture materials design (T881)
• An introduction to finite element analysis (T884)

How to register

To register a place on this course return to the top of the page and use the Click to register button. For more information and advice about registration see OU Study Explained.

Student Reviews

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The Open University is the world’s leading provider of flexible, high quality distance learning. Unlike other universities we are not campus based. You will study in a flexible way that works for you whether you’re at home, at work or on the move. As an OU student you’ll be supported throughout your studies – your tutor will guide and advise you, offer detailed feedback on your assignments, and help with any study issues. Tuition might be in face-to-face groups, via online tutorials, or by phone.

For more information about distance learning at the OU read Study explained.

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