DEVELOPMENT OF A TOOL TO COORDINATE THE DEGREE PROJECT IN THE EUROPE HIGHER EDUCATION

The degree project (DP), at Bachelor and Master engineering degrees, is covered in most universities as a core subject in which students must apply the knowledge gained in the development of a technical project.

The European Higher Education (EHE) must ensure a control mechanism for teaching quality. This control becomes more complex in the DP subject as there is not an explicit program and it involves a large numbers of teachers, either supervising or evaluating them.

The DP is approached as a multidisciplinary activity that confronts the student to solve a problem in all of its phases. The student must do the work plan, including time and expenses costs, choose the technology to be applied and the tools to be used, perform a bibliographic review, describe and perform the product testing and finally evaluate the results.

Following we provide the deficiencies found in our University which have motivated us to the develop a tool and how it helps to solve the deficiencies:

•Not all projects are available at the start of the academic year. Teachers propose projects throughout the academic year. The use of our tool projects may be proposed only at the beginning of the academic year.

•There is no explicit commitment between the project supervisor and the student. There is a high rate of project abandonment and projects that take more than one academic year to conclude. Our tool allows detailing the deadlines to be met by the student.

•There is no control of proposed projects undertaken by teachers. The proposals are too open or closely related research topics. The DP is confused with a doctoral research work. Our proposal encourages self study but guided, at every stage of development. Proposals must be realistic and affordable in the proposed timeframe. It will be validated not only by the project manager but also for members who have to to do the final evaluation. If a project does not have sufficient quality it will be detected at the early stages and can be conveniently modified. Our proposal, involves the evaluators in the early stages of the project, acting as a client of the DP.

•There is no model of cooperative learning. When working at the industry it is common to work in a multidisciplinary team. At our University a project only involves work between the student and the supervisor. Using our tool a DP can be developped by several students and several supervisors in such a way that each student has his/her tasks and deadlines defined .

•In a technical project there are very important initial decisions that have to be taken, concerning the solving of problems and what platform or tools may suit better. We have detected many projects that do not take into account this preliminary part, leading to a poor outcome. The project evaluators will be assigned automatically, according to their affinity to the project, therefore they will be familiar with the best tools or methodologies to be used in each case and may be helpful providing their experience in the initial phase.

• Many management tasks related to the the DP can be automated. This will help the subject coordinator to focus on major issues.

Summarizing, a tool is presented, compatible with the support tools used at many Universities (Moodle), to facilitate the adoption of the criteria of the EHE in the the DP at BSC and Master engineering degrees.