Abstract:

Professors in Engineering, specifically in Telecommunication Engineering, detect a lack of students’ motivation in the last years. Especially, in the most fundamental courses, where more abstract contents are taught, it is challenging to keep students’ interest during the lectures. This is likely because students from Engineering have expectations of very practical courses when they decide to start an Engineering degree. However, there are courses, such as Fundamentals of Electromagnetism or Microwave Engineering, that require mathematical language at an advanced level and the understanding of physical phenomena that are less intuitive. Although exercises are a must in any of these subjects, they are usually very academic and do not serve the purpose of bringing the contents to realistic situations that these students must face in their professional future.

A team of professors of Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Malaga, in Spain, started last year an innovation teaching project that consists in implementing the Case Method (CM) in some courses of several degrees. The 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. The primary goal was to increase the students’ motivation and engagement, but additionally the acquisition of soft skills such as creativity, communication, critical thinking or organization.

In each of the involved courses, one or several realistic cases have been proposed by the professors to be discussed and solved later on by the students; in a first stage, individually; secondly, in groups, and finally, in a plenary session where each group had to present their solution. The method is evaluated through satisfaction surveys, both to professors and students. The results of the first year of implementation of the project revealed a high level of satisfaction with this methodology and high success in achieving the goals. However, the survey used for evaluation failed in some aspects, such as the lack of homogeneity in the questions type. In order to improve the project evaluation, the students’ questionnaire has been reformulated using questions with Likert scale and organized in six blocks: learning, critical thinking, efficiency, engagement, team work and COVID-19 situation, with a total of 27 questions. For this improvement of the surveys, the professors from Telecommunication Engineering have counted on two professors with expertise in Behavioral Sciences Methodology. In this communication, the advances in the development of the teaching project will be explained in detail and the so-far available evaluation results of the academic year 2020-2021 will be analyzed.

Keywords:

Case method, Evaluation, Motivation, Telecommunications Engineering.