Abstract:

During the last thirteen years an important collaboration between Talca’s University from Chile and Girona’s University from Spain gave as a result a Postgraduate Degree in Industrial Design and Product Development as an own certificate. This course is articulated through different goals: Provide basic knowledge of product design and development; learn the use of computer graphics tools; provide methodology and techniques within the context of the product project. These objectives are organized in different subjects and students attend Girona’s University during a semester, from February to June.

This document shows the evolution of our teaching methodology during the above-mentioned period, together with changes introduced. The way to make the analysis is using an evaluation through competences. Our data on competences comes from the self-evaluation of a group of university students using an ICT-based tool, called Cycloid.

Cycloid was conducted during different periods (2010-2022) at the University of Girona with different Postgraduate students from Chile. The objective of competence evaluation is to consider themselves as the Project Managers of their learning degree. This analysis can allow them a test of the six groups of competences provided by the tool (self knowledge, self-control, cognitive capability, motivating oneself, empathy, and social skills), both in present and future states as well as the gap between them in relation to the previously described performance measures.

The competences analysis gives us the opportunity to change our teaching process. During the last courses, we introduced lots of changes in our methodology through the competences results. Incorporating lots of different ways to learn, like utilities to help students in their work, more information data base, gamification of some blocks, videos… Introducing a different way to explain all the processes and encouraging them to pass each section of the subject. Our continuous evaluation gives them a level situation immediately. They have more homework, however not in quantity but in quality. Every week they can control their progressive learning. At the end of the course, students can evaluate the experience and give feedback to professors, in order to improve quality.

As a conclusion of this study, we can state that our results are excellent compared to the results of the last previous three years. Students get higher marks, feel more self-confidence and comfortable.

Keywords:

Higher education, international, ICT, Cycloid.