IMPROVEMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING AND ACTIVE PARTICIPATION IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS OF THE TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENGINEERING STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MÁLAGA

The European Space for High Education (EEES) involves a change on the educational paradigm, which should emphasize on the student learning process. Carrying out this educational paradigm change involves not only the students but also the professors.

• Students have to get involved to a greater extent on the teaching and learning processes, as well as to create a critical thinking to be able to improve the information they receive and to think about the information from the surrounding world to learn from it.
• Professors have to involve the students on all the elements which are part of the teaching and learning processes and to awake the need of think about the information they receive and the information about the world surrounding them.

In this paper we present different strategies oriented to improve the critical thinking and the active participation on the teaching and learning processes of the students at the Telecommunications Engineering School at the University of Málaga as well as the results when applicating those strategies during the 2008/2009 course. The basic tool used is the Virtual Campus of the University of Málaga.

The more innovative aspects on which our experiences ground are as follows:

1. To encourage the critical thinking of the students about their training, creating different forums where they have to evaluate, to propose and to carry out solutions for improving the everyday teaching.
2. To involve the students on the subjects evaluation process using questions and answers proposed by themselves as candidates for the final exam.

This paper present the results of the application of the strategies above commented on 9 subjects corresponding to 12 different groups of students. Thus, we cover all the academic courses (5) which compose the Telecommunication Engineering studies. The total number of students we take into account on the study presented on this paper rises to 450.

The main conclusions obtained from this work are:

• The students look up the forums content in order to keep themselves up to date with the lectures development and to the additional support material (100% of the attending students). Nevertheless, in many cases the students refuse to participate on the lectures since they are afraid to look ridiculous.
• The more successful forums correspond to those which have involved the students on the subject evaluation process. In fact, some students have proposed exam questions on these forums. However, most students just answered the proposed question.
• We found that is harder to express an opinion about the teaching and the subjects contents for first course students. On the other hand, students of higher courses are more courageous to participate and to express their opinion. This is due to first course students haven’t got a clear idea about what they expect from their studies.
• It is significant that several groups didn’t provide any information about how to improve the teaching. In the same way, these groups didn’t propose exam questions. However, they followed the news forum and downloaded the provided support material.

The educational experiences and the results shown in this paper are within the framework of the first year of the Innovative Educational Project funded by the Universiry of Málaga (PIE08-005).