Abstract:

In most pre-Bolonia study plans, learning was aimed at acquiring specific knowledge to be later applied to solve problems, leaving unattended other generic competences even if these may be crucial to students in their working life. These complementary competences were assumed to be learnt indirectly, so that neither course contents nor formative activities were specifically designed to acquire them. Furthermore, none automatic evaluation method was used to assess the acquired abilities either.

This paper will describe the practitioner experience of fifth year undergraduate telecommunication engineering students developing complementary abilities. Apart from consolidating theoretical contents by putting into practice and evaluating Signal Processing methods and algorithms for multimedia applications, students will develop competences such as decision making, project design, self-learning, analysis and synthesis abilities, organization and work planning, oral and writing skills, critical analysis of results and team working.

Initially, guided-teaching introductory practices are proposed to familiarize students with the experimental methodology, presentation and analysis of the results. In a second phase, students must carry out different practical projects in teams, where not only organization within teams is crucial to progress in their goal but also intra-team cooperation and collaboration. Particularly, each team must simultaneously play the following roles:

- Developer role: it comprises most of the work because it includes the algorithmic development, the experimental work and the analysis of the achieved results. This role promotes self-learning, self-sufficiency, critical analysis of results and team working.
- Organizer role: every team should demonstrate their ability to plan their work, as well as monitor their efforts, implementation schedule, project advances, etc. Each team must propose an initial planning and update it through brief progress reports also available to other teams. Self-organization is promoted.
- Reviewer/advisor role: every team should demonstrate their ability to understand other team problems. Besides, they should be capable of critically analyzing the planning and advances carried out by other teams, providing them feedback and advice, if necessary. This role encourages inter-team collaboration, critical spirit and analysis ability.
- Assessor role: every team should quantitatively assess the quality of the work performed by teams (exposed in public in an oral session), providing a ranking of all teams, themselves included. Self-criticism and evaluation ability is promoted.

Teachers have been available at any moment to advise teams about the roles. In order to put the experience in motion, the university intranet tools (Moodle-based) are used (forums, notice board, links to documents, etc.). Moreover, we propose appropriate assessment methods for every learning role. In the full paper we will provide more details about the teaching experience, as well as the observed results.

Summarizing, the teaching experience was positively accepted by the students, since they have identified it as a way of approaching the working life, especially in bigger projects where a lot of people are involved and it is necessary to share knowledge. The clearest indicator of success is that only a 5% of students would not recommend studying the subject in the future.

Keywords:

Collaborative learning, role-playing, general competences, undergraduate teaching experience.