Abstract:

These are days in which professors must change the way they teach and students must change the way they learn. We consider it is high time to face up these challenges.
Practice-oriented Laboratories (POLs) are the most industry-like environment where students can develop those competences more directly related to their professional lives. During the last term, we were asked to manage competence-driven teaching in POLs for the subjects of Software Engineering, Database Systems, and Information System Audit. After sharing our experiences, a set of common problems found, made us realize the need we had for some guidance.
This way, we conducted a research on the existing proposed methodologies, activities, etc., related to competence-driven teaching. We found that Problem-based Learning (PBL), Cooperative Learning (CL) and Tutorship could help us.
Therefore, given that learning is now directly related to developing competences, and using our previous teaching experience, we have proposed a methodology based on (1) planning of POLs sessions and activities, (2) drawing up the wordings of the problems to be solved in each POLs session, (3) executing/solving the proposed problems, and (4) evaluating the problems, also in a competence-driven way.
For activity (1), professors must collect information from the secretary’s office, as well as from their teaching documentation. The first kind of information must describe the number of students, possible groups and planned sessions. The second kind will include teaching goals and scoring criteria.
With all of this information, professors can face the task (2) and draw up the wordings of the different problems. They must try to balance complexity and scope. We propose to take into account PBL’s foundations to design the wordings and to make them all consistent to the course teaching goals.
Once written the wordings, students must work on a solution for the proposed problems at the POLs (3). Obviously, the solutions will depend on every subject nature, so we are more interested in “how” they get to these solutions. As part of our methodology, we propose the use of PBL and CL to do it. So, students can build the solution in a cooperative way. This cooperative environment is very industry-like. And student must not only work on technical issues, but also, indirectly, on group management, playing different roles, as required by CL.
The quality of the ongoing solutions must be checked several times along the development of the work (4). Professors need evidences about the quality of the reached solutions for scoring the works and also about the “professional” implication of all students during the process, so that they can be provided with valuable feedback. This fact requires a previously planned debate between professor and students. Tutorships can help at this point.
The main contribution of this paper is a methodology for the management of competence-driven teaching in POLs. In the paper, we will further detail the most interesting issues of each activity, as well as introducing some experiences using the methodology.

Keywords:

Competences, Problem-based Learning, Cooperative Learning, Tutorship, Practice-Oriented Laboratories.