INTEGRATION OF PROBLEM BASED LEARNING WITH THE TEACHING PORTFOLIO LIKE EDUCATIONAL TOOLS. AN EXPERIENCE IN ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING

The convergence process in the frame of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has supposed a great revolution inside the university education, producing an important change in the paradigm education / learning in the area of the educational society. In the mentioned context appears the need of an education model in which the classes are composed in a dialogue; where the teacher acts of stimulator of the participation (raising varied activities and formulating you ask to the student) and the student adopts an active role in the classroom, promoting the comprehensive learning, the application of knowledge and the capture of decisions; so that the communication in the binomial professor - student is bidirectional. It is a question of a vision of the education in which the student is the centre or attention area and where the teacher has, paradoxically, a decisive role. To assume this change in the educational paradigm, it supposes that the teacher must adopt the introduction of new methodologies in his educational task, which can cause modifications in both the organization of the learning and in the evaluation systems.

The incorporation of active and collaborative methodologies such as: the Learning based on Problems and / or Projects PBL (Problem / Project Based Learning) and Teaching Portfolio (TP) allows that the student should reach a much more significant learning assuming, in turn, the responsibility of his own learning. The goals are to help the students to develop flexible knowledge, effective problem solving skills, self-directed learning, effective collaboration skills and intrinsic motivation. With the application of this type of educational methodologies the student develops another type of generic or transverse competences as: work in group, search of information, analysis and synthesis capacity, leadership, planning and management of the time or the auto-learning. The progressive introduction of problems of realistic application adapted at the level of knowledge, so much for his development in blackboard as proposed for work of the students in the preparation of the matter, has allowed giving to the above mentioned subject a much more practical approach. The aim is not other that the student estimates as soon as possible any applications and industrial developments of the Electronics, implemented on the Engineering, though it is in a version simplified of the educational process. The material belonging to the activities developed by the student forms a part of the student teaching portfolio; who asks him to support updated. This folder can be inspected, of random form, by the teacher for his later evaluation, during the academic course. As for the educational used tools, the student portfolio turns out to be completely adapted for the management of this type of active methodologies in the educational context, since it allows to the students to study in depth the comprehension of the problem, to demonstrate his progress of learning and is an excellent method of evaluation that solves always difficult task of evaluating the work developed by the group.