Abstract:

When students only attend a class inside a classroom to listen to a professor, they do not have enough opportunities to develop all the hard and soft skills needed for excellent performance on their personal and professional lives (Quieng, et al. 2015). They may have a significant amount of information. However, they are are not able to transfer their main learnings to real-life situations, solve different kinds of problems, work collaboratively, make appropriate decisions, and many other essential outcomes needed for nowadays society (Brown et al. 2017).

Because of these, the Pedagogy School of Universidad Panamericana Campus Aguascalientes, since August 2016, has been designed and applied a method that is helping for the best development and learning performance of the students: Integral Projects. Based on the PBL method (Savery, 2015) and by a design thinking chart (Koh et al. 2015), it has been achieved the integration of each of the subjects in a complete intervention process in a real-life context attending a specific problem in different areas of their profession.

By these, students can develop different professional experiences, networking with professionals of different areas and also, the collaboration between students, professors, and external authorities. That lets them have more and better employment opportunities, better academic approaches, and higher personal mastery

In order to determine the effectiveness of this method, a research study was developed in the University, in which 80 students and 30 teachers of the School of Pedagogy participated, answering an instrument with quantitative and qualitative items related to three dimensions. There are:
(a) learning achievement due to integral projects method,
(b) organization and management of the projects, and
(c) personal thinking about the method.

The collected data were analyzed with SPSS and AtlasTi. The results showed exciting findings such as the fact that these projects help to develop professional competence and soft skills in students, and in the other hand, that factors related to organization and communication between authorities of the School, teachers, and students, represent weaknesses that should be attended to improve.

The results are being used to redesign the pedagogy model of the School. The new Learning Outcome model of the University fosters the use of active methodologies. These methodologies are considered as essential tools to achieve de graduated profile. Also, new strategies for teacher training are being developed, such as the Educational Innovation Master that will help professors to acquire new teaching competencies.

References:
[1] Brown, M. S. N., Fitzgerald, M. S. N., Flood, M. S. N., CBC, T., Kane, M. S. N., CEN, M., ... & CPNP-PC, L. (2017). Looking beyond the traditional: integrating a new curriculum design into an immersion practicum evaluation tool.
[2] Koh, J. H. L., Chai, C. S., Wong, B., & Hong, H. Y. (2015). Design thinking for education: Conceptions and applications in teaching and learning. Springer.
[3] Quieng, M. C., Lim, P. P., & Lucas, M. R. D. (2015). 21st Century-Based Soft Skills: Spotlight on Non-Cognitive Skills in a Cognitive-Laden Dentistry Program. European Journal of Contemporary Education, 11(1), 72-81.
[4] Savery, J. R. (2015). Overview of problem-based learning: Definitions and distinctions. Essential readings in problem-based learning: Exploring and extending the legacy of Howard S. Barrows, 9, 5-15.

Keywords:

Educational quality, Educational Innovation, Project-Based Learning, University, Mexico.