Abstract:

Higher Education must adapt the teaching-learning process to the new challenges of the 21st century. Society demands competitive professionals and responsible citizens for the future. Specific contents will continue to be important for the graduates, but transversal skills will undoubtedly be the most demanded in the labor market. The implementation of active learning methodologies together with the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) will be mandatory to optimize the teaching-learning process, to develop the transversal competences and to reach the adaptive and personalized learning.

To this respect, Educational platforms, such as Moodle or Google Classroom, will play an essential role. At present, these Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) are the usual way of communication between lecturer and student and are frequently used for direct learning and evaluation purposes. Given the wide functionalities, such as questionnaires, wikis or forums, each user leaves a detailed digital footprint about their activities, which can be analyzed and processed to establish patterns of behavior and learning.

From the institutional point of view, many countries are promoting the exploitation of Learning Analytics (LA) potential to ensure and improve education quality, to monitor the learning process and to reduce dropout rates by identifying risk cases. On the other hand, Learning Analytics can be used in a more direct way to monitor the learning process in order to implement correction in time, to inform the student and the teacher about the learning progress, even to predict the final success.

With the aim of monitoring and assessing the reception and the perception from students of the applied methodologies and the recommended resources, the authors have collected and analyzed diverse data from the Moodle platform to this end. Innovative experiences in the flipped classroom model (FCM) with help of ICT resources in the subject of Engineering Thermodynamics and Fundamentals of Heat Transfer are here presented, and compared to the light of LA for Degrees in Industrial Technologies Engineering and Chemical Engineering at the University of Zaragoza. Through different information extracted from the Moodle raw data and from pools answered by students, some conclusions have been drawn regarding habits and practices associated to better learning results.

Keywords:

Learning Analytics, ICT, Flipped Classroom, Engineering Learning, Higher Education.