With course work now becoming mandatory for postgraduate students and the flipped classroom being encouraged in our tertiary institutions, we present a new approach to course design and implementation that bridges the gap between standard undergraduate course work and research. The unit that was developed in the present work is essentially a guided research project in quantitative convergent beam electron diffraction (QCBED).
For this unit (MTE5881/6881 at Monash), 26 PhD and 1 Masters student were led in the collection of CBED data from the textbook aluminium-copper alloy that forms the basis for many commonly used alloys in the automobile, structural, packaging and aerospace industries. The aim was to measure the bonding electron density in a nano-composite material for the first time [1, 2] (a separate abstract has been submitted to the scientific program where the results will be discussed). In order to make the most out of this large cohort of postgraduate students, the course included online and in-class lectures covering applied crystallography, electron diffraction and QCBED. Each student was given an account on the Monash Campus Cluster (a high performance / high throughput computing cluster) and taught how to process the raw data and perform the QCBED pattern-matching refinements needed to measure bonding in nano-composite materials. Most of the contact hours were spent in a workshop environment with lecturer (PN) and students working together to analyse data with guest lectures and much assistance from eResearch (PC) and the proposer and supplier of the material to be characterised (LB).
An aim of the unit is the publication of a paper with all those engaged in the course named as co-authors. In future years, staff across the Department and in other disciplines will be approached to propose research problems in collaboration with the unit and its participants.