COORDINATING COURSE CONTENTS ACCORDING TO ESHE

The Escuela Politécnica Superior de Ingeniería de Gijón (EPSIG) is actually working to adapt the Telecommunication Engineer degree to the European Space of High Education (ESHE) and the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS).
In this sense we are developing a project to coordinate the contents as well as the distribution of the student work focused on
• The content coordination of the different courses.
• The design of common activities among the different courses to better understand the global background of the courses.
• The allocation of the homework to avoid overloads.
We are introducing this methodology since October 2008. During the design time we have divided the total work time of the student among the different courses in a proportional way. Indeed we developed a student guide for each course according to the common strategy.
The Discrete Mathematics (DM) and Programming Elements (PE) courses are both included in this experiment. Both are mandatory to get the degree. In PE the students must learn a programming language and to design algorithms to solve simple problems. The main objective of DM is to introduce certain discrete structures with which the student will work in the following courses.
Although DM has no computer lab classes, it would be a good learning complement to check the performance of some algorithms studied in DM course. On the other hand, the PE students cannot easily elaborate and propose solution algorithms, especially if they are not used to the problem to be solved. Therefore we decided to propose the PE students to program some algorithms seen in DM. This proposal has two main advantages:
• The students program a problem already studied, so they are supposed to perfectly know the problem to be solve and to focus the efforts only on applying the programming methodology.
• On the other side, the student runs the algorithms studied, which is supposed to help him/her to better understand the DM contents. Besides, the competence of analyzing something and to solve problems could be deeply developed.
Therefore we have designed joint activities to merge knowledge and skills taking into account the following facts.
• The job schedule. The selection of the DM objectives moved to PE has been carefully selected so that the programs proposed in PE were deeply studied in DM in advance. On the other hand both courses start in October but DM ends in February while PE ends in June. Then these joint activities are delayed until the middle of the first term.
• The homework charge is reduced: the student reaches two objectives (to understand some DM contents and to improve programing) at the same time.
• The objectives are appropriate to the available resources.
Hence, the coordination between both educational teams -that from PE and that from DM- should be high enough to provide coherence. The designed method is as follows. First, both educational teams decide the concepts and algorithms to be shared. Then the PE team proposes the problem statements that students must faced in the laboratory sessions. The DM team revises the statements in order to keep the same taxonomies and vocabulary used in DM. Finally, the PE proposed the problem statements in a series of Laboratory sessions, and judge the solutions proposed. As stated before, it is expected that the students should solver easily these coordinated laboratory sessions than those with generic problem statements.
In this work we show the results of this experience.