Abstract:

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) involves a change of the educational paradigm, which should emphasize the active participation of the student on the learning process.
The goal of the active participation is to involve the students in all the elements of the teaching and learning processes and to awake their need of reflect upon the education they receive and the information of the world surrounding them. Besides, this active participation can be used to improve the subjects and to improve the motivation of the students on the subject.
In this paper, we present the strategies oriented to improve the motivation of students through their active participation on the teaching and learning processes. Students involved in this research, are enrolled in the lectures of the Superior Technical School of Telecommunication Engineering (ETSIT) of the University of Málaga (UMA). The lectures belong to the subject Musical Acoustics of the degree of "Ingeniería Técnica de Telecomunicacion" (ITT), group of Sound and Image, which is a three year degree. This subject is elective of the third course.
Also, we present how this active participation of students is going to be used to improve the organization of the new subject Musical Acoustics of the new degree of "Graduado en Ingeniería de Sonido e Imagen" (GSI), that is going to be taught first in the academic course 2013/2014.

The crucial targets our experiences are the following:
• To encourage the critical thinking of the students by asking repeatedly what they want to learn in the subject Musical Acoustic.
• To involve the students in the teaching process offering to present in class the issues they suppose important for their colleges.

The main conclusions obtained from this work are:
• The motivations of students enrolled in Musical Acoustics are diverse, but most of them want to improve or to obtain knowledge about music.
• When the classes are participatory or in different format than the classic ones, student get better results than in the not participatory ones.
• Students like to present in class issues that they consider important and to provide to their colleges a lot of practical examples. Also, they are very interested in that their colleges present.

Keywords:

Telecommunication Engineering, Critical thinking, Active participation, Musical Acoustics.