USE OF A PBL-APPROACH TO DEVELOP AND TO ASSESS GENERIC COMPETENCES IN A MASTER’S DEGREE IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

The Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering has been taught in the Technical University of Valencia (UPV) in its actual version since 2014. The reports on the quality assessment of this Degree have been very positive in the recent years, but some improvements have been pointed out. These improvements refer mainly to the development and the assessment of generic competences, such as the ability to plan and manage time, the ability to work in a team, the ability to act on the basis of ethical reasoning and the commitment to the conservation of the environment, among others, using the terminology of the Tuning project.

In order to respond to these improvements, an innovative educational project was devised. The main idea in this project was to use the Project Based Learning approach to introduce some activities along the Degree that would help the students to develop these generic competences. The use of a learning-oriented active methodology is, in the authors’ opinion, essential to force the students to put their skills into play, so that the required competences can be practiced and evaluated.

In particular, two type of activities have been planned. First, some of the subjects in the Degree related to Mechanical Design and Structural Integrity have coordinated with each other to set out a design problem that needs from the knowledge and the techniques that are being learnt in these subjects. The students are divided into teams and they have to collaborate in order to complete a set of reports during the year. To carry these reports out, the students will have to work on some generic competences, what will provide several opportunities to assess them.

Second, a Master Thesis has been offered to the students in which they are challenged to complete a real industry project. This Thesis has been named “Design Challenge” and it has been formulated in collaboration with the company STADLER, which is a train manufacturer that has a factory close to the university. There is a final contest in which they have to show their solutions to a jury, which is composed of experts from the company and some lecturers from the Degree. The assessment of the generic competences that the students will have to develop in order to achieve a successful solution is shared between the supervisor, the jury and themselves, by using different evaluation strategies.

This work describes the learning activities planned using the PBL-approach and the assessment tools. The advantages and drawbacks of this proposal will be detailed, and some conclusions will be obtained in order to upgrade it for next year.