THESIS STUDENT COLLABORATION ON THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF INTERACTIVE TUTORIALS FOR TELECOMMUNICACION ENGINEERING EDUCATION

1. Introduction
In high education, it is usual that students who have already taken certain subjects collaborate on their teaching in following years, e.g. as tutor students for freshmen or laboratory instructors.
On the other hand, to complete a degree, Telecommunication Engineering students at University of Malaga are required to accomplish a thesis. A thesis is an individual work where students apply, in a coordinate form, skills and abilities acquired during their academic curriculum. Thesis students, who have already tracked the whole degree, are very valuable elements to receive feedback about the whole teaching/learning process.
This work describes an educational project carried out in Bachelor and Master degrees in Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Malaga. Within this project, bachelor and master thesis students have been involved in the teaching/learning process of several subjects of Signal Theory and Communications area. Specifically, they have designed and also implemented distance learning material named as “tutorials”.

2. The tutorial
A tutorial can be seen as a problem whose solution is guided by the own environment, strengthening the critic reasoning, relating concepts unconnected at first, and using scattered knowledge. Tutorials are not lectures with distant access, but an interactive application where the active student is the main character.
A tutorial addresses several topics of a subject matter or several related subjects. To be useful, tutorials should look easy to use at a first sight, and each step should explain what is done and with which aim.

3. Development process
Each Bachelor and Master Thesis to be carried out within this educational project has the objective of designing and implementing a tutorial. Teacher proposes to the thesis student the conceptual framework that the tutorial must address and the basic requirements of the multimedia educational material. The tutorial should present a problem related to the subject and guide the student to solve it.
The thesis student should, as a first step, go into a group of subjects in depth. Afterwards, he/she will give a detailed specification of the tutorial. The student, from his/her own experience, designs the content of the tutorial. The teacher gives advice when requested, helps with the definition of the tutorial scenarios and supervises the specification design.
Tutorials materialize as web applications to be run from any computer with Internet access. The thesis student implements it by applying knowledge from areas beyond Signal Theory but included in Telecommunication Engineering curriculum. The teacher also helps the student in this phase.

4. Suitability evaluation
More than half a dozen tutorials have been set up by thesis students. These tutorials are being used during 2009/2010 on the teaching of Circuit and Systems, Digital Communications and Optical Communication, followed by about 300 students. As those subjects are placed in the second term, the evaluation process of the project is partially being carried out. Its benefits for the thesis students have been proved in the success of their thesis exams. To evaluate the suitability of the tutorials, users are asked to fill in a brief survey after completing them. It includes questions about both the usability and the concepts themselves. The feedback will be available at the end of the semester and the evaluation results will be presented at the conference.