Abstract:

The lack of students’ motivation is one of the most important problems that professors at Telecommunication Engineering must face. This is especially significant in theoretical subjects that comprises the most abstract contents. Radiocommunications or Electromagnetic Engineering, where the physical rationale of wave propagation is studied, are some of these disciplines. Some students identify these subjects’ syllabus as a box plenty of hard concepts. Indeed, there is a significant percentage of students that find issues passing such subjects, which is bounded to a loss of interest that affects not only students, but also professors. The acquisition of competences in such subjects requires the use of a mathematical language at an advanced level and the understanding of physical phenomena that are less intuitive for students that study these contents for the first time.

The use of teaching techniques that allow an intuitive understanding of the most abstract topics can be crucial to reach the course goals. Specifically, formulating realistic problems in which these complex concepts can be tangible certainly helps students’ comprehension. This is even more important in engineering, since engineers’ final goals are focused on developing applications for the real world. Although, generally, in engineering degrees, every subject contains a set of practical exercises to be solved by students, these are, in general, academic problems rather than realistic ones.

The Case Method (CM) is an innovative teaching methodology that consists in proposing real-world cases to the students in order for them to investigate, plan actions and discuss in groups the different dimensions of the problem. CM allows the application of the acquired knowledge and the evaluation of possible solutions with a critical eye. Too often, engineers’ curricula do not pay significant attention to the so-called soft skills such as communication, problem-solving, organization or creativity that are highly important in almost all roles and employments. The CM methodology is considered an appropriate approach to combine technical learning and acquisition of these abilities.

This contribution presents the first results of a teaching project that implements this methodology in several disciplines of Telecommunication Engineering degrees at the Universidad de Málaga, in Spain. Several realistic cases have been proposed by professors in their classes to be discussed and analysed later on by the students, both individually and in groups. Plenary discussions of the solutions and the decision-making process have been carried out, in order to foster the critical judgement and to improve the presentation skills. Answers obtained from questionnaires to both students and professors are statistically and qualitatively analysed to show the satisfaction level of this activity from both perspectives. For instance, the surveys revealed that the CM has been useful for the 100% of professors involved in this project to detect knowledge deficiencies and it has been extraordinarily well accepted by the students, who would in a very high percentage recommend the application of this technique to other disciplines. Additionally, and due to the unavoidable impact of COVID-19 emergency on this academic year, some helpful information related to the inconveniences found in the application of this technique during the pandemic will be commented in the manuscript.

Keywords:

Case method, learning process, skills, Telecommunication Engineering.